I tried for a while to integrate the practice of identifying givens and developing conversation in the pre-meetings around these things. The last time I did it, the conversation about the givens became so large that the whole event was postponed indefinitely.
Since then, there was one case where givens were useful. I was working with a child welfare organization to develop strategy in five specific areas: service delivery model, government relations, financial resources, human resources and labour relations. Participants in the meeting (the Board and staff and some key stakeholders) were invited to convene any topic they wanted to, but if they wanted their thoughts to make it into the final plan, it need to be slotted into one of the five categories. We divided the news wall into five and people posted their proceedings in the appropriate "bin." Only one set of proceedings lay entirely outside of the scope of the exercise, which was fine for everyone. It was a conversation that needed to happen and it did. For the action planning day, the participants were invited to assign themselves to one of the five areas of consideration and to review all of the proceedings in that area and come up with the "go forward" strategy ideas. The participants collapsed the categories of human resources and labour relations together, took flipchart to the four corners of the room and met for an hour and a half, crafting excellent strategy in the end. By lunch we were done. The participants had talked about their passions, and the leadership got their strategic plan addressing those five key areas. I thought this was a very elegant use of the givens on management's part. They DID have outcomes, but wanted to leave the entire process as open as possible while still asking the participants to help them focus on these five areas. It was a lovely balance. I believe I suggested the design to them based on something Michael Pannwitz had contributed to the list. Other than that, I largely subscribe to the theory that whatever we give our attention to grows. I have found the givens naming and identifying process to be an obstruction to opening and a little deflating. For the most part if there are impossible situations, it's best for people to discover that themselves and either become creative about working around them, or realize themselves that their efforts and energy may be better directed in other ways. Chris ------------------------- CHRIS CORRIGAN Consultation - Facilitation Open Space Technology Weblog: http://www.chriscorrigan.com/parkinglot Site: http://www.chriscorrigan.com * * ========================================================== [email protected] ------------------------------ To subscribe, unsubscribe, change your options, view the archives of [email protected]: http://listserv.boisestate.edu/archives/oslist.html To learn about OpenSpaceEmailLists and OSLIST FAQs: http://www.openspaceworld.org/oslist
