Well, I'd be happy if it were so ; and as a result may have given fellow knowledge management europeans an overlong dose, which also had to be cut in parts because the particular virtual community cant cope with more than 2000 chars per post
If you'd like to add some comments, the following 6000 chars are at http://www.knowledgeboard.com/cgi-bin/item.cgi?id=132092&d=1&h=417&f=56&; dateformat=%o%20%B%20%Y Part 4 Through deep experience, Harrison's Owen's model of innovation and transformation matures around helping people of all levels to face up to crises of trust together. If we are to sustainably reconcile any situation where human conflict has depressingly reigned, we must enable people to recover communal awareness. Begin by regaining respect for each other as human beings however much history prior to the opening of space compounded hatreds or ideological differences. Moreover, history's particular Conflict usually has a root cause in a community/organisation when something changed in the environment. Picture a system that previously involved perfect management controls, having in some way broken down, and leadership Confusion of what u-turn is actually now essential. Then failure to wholly address change just-in-time. Then quarter after quarter, the system compounds further errors, and attracts a perfect storm of change forces. Then people feel life is Chaos; lose confidence in self and others; with hope lost, all the warring emotions may unleash within the organisation's body politic. So the only reconciliation possible requires renewal of the deepest respect between people and asking them to collectively dare discover freedom to self-organise rather than be subjected to more control of the uncontrollable. This simultaneous conflict busting is achieved by having the quality time and space to engage mutually in inquiring what possible solutions can 'we' collectively discover and begin practising anew. Innovation, writ large and reborn systemically! Is there more to understanding the practice and consequences of Open Space than we have just described? Well, yes a quarter of century's schooling which now encompasses over 50000 cases, many involving the biggest organisational challenges groups of people have ever joined together to try to resolve . The meetings have involved any number of participants from 5 to 5000. They have been conducted in 80 countries, so the system's spirit is proven as trans-cultural. Experienced facilitators of open space form an alumni group around Harrison where experiences have been openly written up and shared. So if you want a method that innovates or maximises the social networks around each person as well as the communal context restoration to health and celebration of human spirit, Open Space is the simplest benchmark against which any other self-organising method's design can be evaluated for impact of contextual integrity and on compounding dynamics of a human relationship system. Lastly, there is a consequent conversion for those who have had the good fortune to participate in one truly convened open space. Should you be responsible for hosting meetings which are intended to make the most of everyone's contribution, you will find that the way you decide to help meetings flow will always be different from that time when you cease to be an open space virgin. Open Space Part 3 Formally, the only organisational control which people agree to whilst relating to each other in open space is "The Law of 2 Feet". If you're in a meeting where the conversation around you is causing you to feel negative emotions, quietly go somewhere else. That way you won't waste your own energy or dilute that of others, and reciprocally if it happens that some people conduct meetings in very one-sided ways, it is likely that during open space they will soon find themselves soliloquising on their own, which in turn leads such people to start adapting their communication manners. Apart from its one guiding rule, open space does assume and stage certain contextual conditions: . Before an open space is the invitation- one overarching reason for coming to the event some of the richest open spaces literally involve a challenge where people may be coming from opposing sides of a deep conflict. . People begin the meeting in a circle, being the layout where every can see each other as an equal spirit (a cultural coda that indigenous cultures and Quakers have authenticated over centuries). . A round of brief (usually less than 60 second) introductions are made where typically each person explains one main reason why there were motivated to come- and spend up to three days - to discuss the issue at hand. . From then on, a market is made of what topics people want to discuss and thus the participants from a timetable of sessions and each person chooses which discussions to attend. Discussion markets then iterate through most of the time devoted to open space. Because such meetings drain a lot of attentive and interpersonal energies, they should be sandwiched with refreshing experiences - the chance to go for a walk and soak up some breathtaking scenery, some picnic-like conviviality with food, some tribal dancing if you will forgive a Scot's idea of bonhomie, or indeed any other manifestation of diverse group culture. Why not re-energise every human being's performance with as much good humour, as well as serious focus, that truly inspired participants can co-create. Another aspect of the patterning of open space is that all the content-convened meetings will be simply documented with a clear title, main points of discussion and action conclusions if any, a list of who attended. Before an open space closes everyone receives this documentation and contact points among all participants are shared so that networking can continue and where action projects have emerged from the meetings these can continue from that day on. So what does open space achieve in its entirety? It gives optimal, as well as diverse and continuing, opportunities for people to form networks. It plants the greatest collective possibility for human interactions to resolve a challenge, to pass together through a conflict barrier. Open Space part 2 An uppermost issue is that any transformation of organisational leadership does not need to be complex, but it does need to relentlessly pose a conflict with what was perceived to be so precise about the traditional powers of strategy, measurement and mastering administration. Specifically, neither classic strategic bibles typified by Michael Porter's research from 1975-1985 nor what was the 20th century tangible accounting monopoly of auditing measures were concerned to help people make the most of their skills within a humanly systemic focus, instead of merely machines making the most use of people. Separation and transaction and standard, not interaction, relationships and deep compounding context were embodied in the old organisational design and power over people as productive agents. As the 1980s progressed, so did value multiplying paradigms for organising human relationship systems advanced through parallel schools (eg organisational learning, intrepreneur systems, , etc). Furthermore, organisational architects from Drucker downwards were arguing that service, globalization and knowledge networking economies would demand a (post-industrial) revolution in leadership beyond mere the command and control culture of the machine age organisation. Theoretically, systemic change in how to produce value was laid out in 1990's strategic frames (eg Kay, Hamel & Prahalad, Collins & Porras) together with interacting organisational designs (eg Wheatley's self-organising, Hock's Chaordic, Biological web frames of Sahtouris and others, Open Source Models, Kelly's model of Economic Democracy, Tapscott's Transparency, Harding's Model of National Comparisons in Sector Productivities, Allee's Value Exchange) outdated Porter's Strategic volumes of the 1980s. To know Open Space's spiritual culture, explore Harrison's earlier career background. Missionary in the Peace Corps in Africa; Anglican priest...Then one day he found himself in a field surrounded by black people who were about to be charged on by police. This was the era when the American Civil rights movement was transforming that nation's society. As a tall lanky young man, he remembers feeling deep fear until a seven year old black girl came up to him and said 'mister will you hold my hand'. That moment changed Harrison's life. He soon gave up his career in the priesthood, a change which also had dramatic effects on his family, several of whom could not understand this new direction. His new career devotion was towards helping facilitate organisational systems where people had the opportunity to commune with deep respect for each other. In turn, this explains why his passionate inquiry into practices of Organisational Transformation evolved to the stage that he had started to coolly master in the 1980s. Open Space -part 1 Chris Macrae Open Space Technology. This methodology, originated in the early 1980s, can help to connect to personal networking , innovation and communal spirit. Big enough news?... well not quite. We like to prepare the stage with a parable about the right stuff of confronting a conflict barrier. Going supersonic: Earlier aviators literally lost all as they crashed trying to pass through the speed of sound, until one dared try out his hypothesis; as he flew through the barrier he needed to turn the cockpit controls the other way round. (Almost all organisational systems need to turn at least one perfect command and control wholly around to pass through conflict barriers or paradigm shifts such as virtual networks. This suggests top people and most of all their professional advisers need a certain modesty about historical top-down precision if the future they are leading to in networked markets is to be worthwhile. Sadly this hasnt yet occurred when it comes to global accounting's mathematically wrong valuation of intangibles and trust-flows. The measurement monopoly -and all who fawn to them - have aborted the knowledge working age for so long that the world is saying ouch from almost every local economy and society.) Let us now return to ground. Open Space's birth came about in the early 1980s when Harrison Owen was the host of the annual conference of Organisation Transformation experts. In spite of his best efforts, feedback from the first two conferences showed that delegates preferred the networking time over coffee, to the main sessions where expert podium speakers talked and the audience listened. Harrison decided to design the 3rd Organisational Transformation conference as a time and space which maximised everyone's opportunity to network. The design rules for how people interact communally in open space are the simplest for self-organising * * ========================================================== osl...@listserv.boisestate.edu ------------------------------ To subscribe, unsubscribe, change your options, view the archives of osl...@listserv.boisestate.edu: http://listserv.boisestate.edu/archives/oslist.html To learn about OpenSpaceEmailLists and OSLIST FAQs: http://www.openspaceworld.org/oslist
