Hi Kim: A couple of thoughts.
Kim Willing wrote:
Also, even if only 250 come to the Friday morning session, would it be unwieldy to use 15 dots each, and given that there may be many more topics than with a smaller group, I'm wondering whether it might be better to ask people to just list their top 10 (rather than 5) issues and to give 1 dot to each vs. ranking them. The counting of dots has to happen fairly quickly once the voting is done and I don't want to make it impossible.
Unless there is a need for some kind of ranking, would you consider using non-convergence? That is, forming action groups without having the vote take place? Basically the way I have been doing it is this way: 1. Hand out reports and invite people to take time to read them, same as convergence. Give them one further instruction: invite them to identify something in the proceedings that really speaks to them and think about how this might get taken out of the room, into the real world. It doesn't have to be one topic, or even a logical grouping of topics. It can be a subtle thread that seems implicit in a few topics and is crying out to be drawn forth. 2. Open Space but this time, ask for people to convene groups focused on ACTION. Give them no more than an hour for their conversations. 3. Hand out session report sheets with these headings: Action Group Name, Convener, Participants, What we will do, Who else we will bring in, When we shall meet again. Use your own headings to capture relevant data. I ask the conveners to focus their groups on these things. Answering the last one is all you really need to make a plan to get it out of the room. 4. I usually invite brief reports on the actions to be undertaken in the closing circle, or just before. This allows people to proclaim the news and attract any others who might have missed the session. There are all kinds of reasons I use this process instead of voting, and you may find some resonance with it. It works very well, and is very satisfying to participants. Most of the time I get a lot of surprise that such concrete action can come out of so much conversation. I think it has to do with the fact that people are identifying real work that needs to be done rather than slotting themselves into groups based on how the votes fall out, in which one topic may receive dozens of low priority votes, meaning that there is little actual passion from any one person to make something happen. In non-convergence, action happens because people are willing to step up right now and make it happen. Sometimes those actions can't be predicted by the results in the proceedings; they seem truly emergent. Anyway, there's an idea for you. Chris * * ========================================================== [email protected] ------------------------------ To subscribe, unsubscribe, change your options, view the archives of [email protected], Visit: http://listserv.boisestate.edu/archives/oslist.html
