At 01:49 PM 5/11/01 +0200, you wrote:
Hi list-friends. A client of mine has planned to hold a 2-day OST with all 170 staff, in june, the last days before they all go for summervacation. The theme was to concern the future of their school (working with "adult learning"). They are in the process of changing from public funding to "free market conditions". 5 public schools will be in a corporation owned by the municipality. Now it seems that they will loose a lot of the courses they have given before and face serious downsizing. The circumstances will be made clear the coming days. The headmaster believes that maybe 50 out of a total 170 persons on his school will have to leave.
Some years ago, I was involved in a plant shut down -- everybody went. Basically we used an early version of Open Space to facilitate the creation of a support-group-of-the-whole which seemed to work marvelously in getting all the folks through the ordeal. Another situation was handled by a friend Hugh Huntington who had a client that literally had to cut itself in half in a very short period. They used Open Space both to design the new entity and also to create a supportive body of folks to help each other through some very tough times. Hugh wrote all that up in a chapter in "Tales from Open Space" which i edited. That is now out of print, but you can get a free copy online at www.openspaceworld.com in the section called "Papers" Harrison
Harrison Owen
7808 River Falls Drive Potomac, MD 20854 USA phone 301-469-9269 fax 301-983-9314 Open Space Training www.openspaceworld.com Open Space Institute www.openspaceworld.org Personal website www.mindspring.com/~owenhh [email protected] To subscribe, unsubscribe, change your options, view the archives of [email protected] Visit: http://listserv.boisestate.edu/archives/oslist.html
