Dear Lisa,
I wonder about the "trust". If I am good and wise and reflected I might
be able to trust myself.
What kind of relationship do I establish between me and something or
between me and someone when I "trust" something or someone?
What about "know", in the sense of "I know that selforganisation exists"
or "I know that I and others do come alive, act and are productive under
the condition of expanded time and space for selforganisation"?
In the end, I might arrive at the same juncture regardless of whether I
"trust" or I "know": open space itself is the most luscious icebreaker
on earth (having seen this in the 170 events I facilitated for teachers,
social workers, mediators, grade school students, doctors, politicians,
government workers, architects, city planners, highschoolstudents,
chemical plant workers, IT specialists, alcoholics, communications
experts, ministers, volunteers, university professors, sanitation
workers...I KNOW it).
Seems to me that "knowing" is much less work for me than "trusting".
Isn't knowing also more robust and reliabel than trusting?
Good thing we can munch on this some more at the WOSonOS beginning tomorrow.
You wont believe this but there were three more folks that signed in
today, 2 from Berlin and one from London.
Sleep tight
mmp
Lisa Heft schrieb:
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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Michael M Pannwitz, boscop eg
Draisweg 1, 12209 Berlin, Germany
++49-30-772 8000
mmpa...@boscop.org
www.boscop.org
Check out the Open Space World Map presently showing 393 resident Open
Space Workers in 68 countries working in a total of 141 countries worldwide
Have a look:
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