Introduction

Larry Peterson lpasoc at inforamp.net
Sun Mar 2 05:53:48 PST 1997


Thanks for the great introductions, I did one earlier I think. I have a few
moments in the midst of an Open Space event with 60 folks from the United
Church of Canada in Scarborough, so I'm reporting briefly on a couple of
things that you will soon hear more about later.

This past week, Birgitt Bolton and I led a 4.5 day Opening the Spaces event
for those who who want to open the space as formal leaders or as
facilitators.  We had some of both: senior execs of a Canadian denomination,
staff consultalts to community economic development projects, government
agency managers and internal consultants. We had pitched it to non-profit
organizations primarily and got barely enough to go (11 participants plus
us). It was a wonderful week!!!! We based the four days on our
intrepretation of the healing  circle: leadership, vision, community and
management. We saw leadership including: risk taking, visioning, enabling
others (opening space) and teaching about the givens. We know how to improve
it, but it worked extremely well!!

On the Friday before, OSI Canada met to explore Learning and Research about
Open Space. It was also a marvelous discussion. We explored the challenges
of Open Space Research--quantitative or qualitative. We mostly explore
possilbe aspects of the research--and even looked at some hypotheses. It
took the discussion another step for me in reflecting on how Open Space
tapping the unconscious 80% of an organization and how to "study" what
happens during and after. Joan De New has developed the report and it will
soon be out. I have a version on disk that will take some converting before
it gets shared, but I will do it if there is interest.

Larry




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