Hi, Lucas - if you trust the process, and you trust the people, no
need to add any additional icebreakers - it is using precious minutes
of their time. Many of us have worked with government folks. My
recommendation is use every moment / don't waste any time / get to the
Open Space. Don't do something directive, or creative, or 'helpy', or
helping them feel something, or weaving them together or anything.
Jump into Open Space. Trust it. Trust them.
This ain't like other designed facilitated meetings. Open Space
delivers. Delivers creativity, discovery, interchange, emergent
thinking.
As long as you are not morphing it or squishing it into too short a
time or rushing them or doing OS when it's really a situation best
done with a different (dialogue) tool.
My two Euros, anyway (I'm WOSonOS-ing in Berlin at the moment)
Lisa
PS: Brightly colored principles and laws signs jazz the place up.
People jazz the place up. Animated conversations jazz the place up....
On Wed, May 12, 2010 at 12:36 PM, Lucas Cioffi
<lu...@athenabridge.org> wrote:
Howdy All,
Bottom line up front: How do you break the ice with participants
unfamiliar to OS?
Here's one way I found helpful:
I recently facilitated an open space workshop for sixty participants
from roughly two dozen federal agencies. The topic was how to make
government more transparent, participatory, and collaborative as
part of the Administration's Open Government Directive.
I'm a novice at OS, but I've learned a bunch from this list and I'm
happy to offer an idea which may be helpful to others. OS can be
intimidating, especially for government employees, so I opened with
a collaborative exercise using balloons. The inspiration came from
a landscape architect's presentation where he accented a landscape
with huge balloon sculptures to give it a playful feel for adults.
Rules of the Game:
Everyone gets 2 colored balloons in a sealed envelope.
There is a point system posted on the wall (Red = 5, Orange = 4,
Yellow = 3, Green = 2, Blue = 1).
Collaboration through trading is heavily incentivized-- if someone
ends up with a pair of balloons which are the same color, then their
score is multiplied times three. This encourages people to mingle
and create win-win scenarios. There are no restrictions on how
balloons can be traded (for example trading 1 for 1, 2 for 1, or
even 0 for 1).
Participants are given three minutes to inflate and trade their
balloons. The goal is to have the most points. (An alternate goal
could be to maximize the number of points for the entire group
rather than individuals.)
Reasons why we opened with a game:
Make it clear that this was a place where it's OK to be creative,
unlike their standard government workplace
Prime the audience for the subject matter of collaboration (learn by
doing)
Have some fun
Build a bit of community among the participants who were mostly
strangers (incentivize mingling).
Create a shared experience.
Create a little chaos.
Jazz up the place visually with a few balloons (it needed some color)
Reasons why we opened with this game for this workshop
Thomas Jefferson had a saying that “He who receives ideas from me,
receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who
lights his taper at mine receives light without darkening me.”
After the exercise I asked the participants what the difference was
between trading a physical object (like a balloon) and sharing an
idea; this exercise was lively and helped them understand that their
purpose during the workshop was to share knowledge and benefit from
others doing the same.
Each month a different agency hosts this workshop for all the other
agencies, and to keep the workshops fresh, our next opener will
consist of small collaborative teams competing to build the tallest
marshmallow-spaghetti tower (here's a fascinating TED video which
describes some stats behind this game).
Any thoughts? Do you open with games or collaborative exercises
that you would recommend? As always, thanks for the discussion!
Lucas
*
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