Hi Viv and All, One of the best things about OST is that the warm-up is inherent on the process. I remember thinking this last year when I did the training sessions with Birgit in Brisbane. And the warm-up starts before the Space is opened. It begins when I receive the notice of training or the invitation to attend and I make the decision to be there - to be one of the "right people".
It continues in the period leading up to the OS when I see it in my diary, meet someone else who will be there, anticipate useful outcomes, and so on. Evening before story-telling warms people up to themselves, the constituting of this group and their capacity to share. And then the flow is really going with opening the space so that after the ritual of walking and talking and engaging people in the way of it, the pens and paper are really beckoning. If irrelevant "games" are introduced or unexpected happenings cut across the natural flow of Open Space, then the warm-up is compromised and people can feel all kinds of things - bored, shocked, abandoned, lost creatively, angry, bewildered, ..... depending ..... The warm-up is alive and very responsive, and ebbs and flows naturally. It is also possible to cut across expectations, disrupt important themes, and even subtly exclude some sub-group by disrupting the warm-up period. So the psychodramatic concept of warm-up is a great way to think about the process in Open Space - it helps me to appreciate how elegantly and simple complex and complete OS is. There's no need to add to it, but rather attend to all of it. It's been said that there is no such thing as resistive people, just inadequate warm-up which encourages me to think about the nature of the process rather than hang extra things on it just in case. I guess we can get hooked into adding something to warm people up to something and forget to tease out whether it's already there. Well, that's a bit of a ramble - hope it adds something to the discussion. Cheers, Ros. * * ========================================================== [email protected] ------------------------------ To subscribe, unsubscribe, change your options, view the archives of [email protected], Visit: http://listserv.boisestate.edu/archives/oslist.html
