Dear Harold,
I can resonate with your agony. I have held a few Open Space
conferences for IT people (up to 200) and I have had the same
worries. But believe me, even the toughest nerds are able to function
fine in Open Space. Be prepared to sit on your hands for a number of
seconds. They may be slow to begin, but they will come. Those few
seconds after you have opened the floor will last an eternity, but it
is worth the wait! Please don't do anything to make it easy for them
- you will ruin the feeling of accomplishment. Just keep breathing.
Koos
At 19:20 14-1-2008, Harold Shinsato wrote:
Dear Owen,
Thank you, it's such an honor to get a reply directly from you. I think my
issue is faith in myself and in the process. I've read the book (some
chapters more than once). I think maybe I just needed to hear it again in a
different way to help me "get" it. I appreciate the encouragement. I've
seen Open Space work in other scenarios and I just need to trust that people
will bring the topics that they care about. But I keep thinking I have to
"do" something to make it work, to allow people to bring questions or topics
like "How can we lead in a 50K Conglomerate?" and not just some engineering
topic that they had to spend a week preparing a powerpoint based on their
prior experience, which is the "box".
It's like an ugly itch in the brain, but is there some way to help me quiet
it down? I keep seeing this image of me opening the space and then no one
filling in any topic cards, or just a few that didn't get put in the first
tracks. Has anyone had experience in a similar situation for 30-50
engineers in a single department but working on different projects?
Harold
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