Preconference work

Birgitt Bolton birgitt at worldchat.com
Wed Jun 24 05:22:16 PDT 1998


Hello Ingrid,
The silent time even if everyone is uncomfortable is an important time.
Hard on the facilitator. And sometimes those times feel like hours and not
minutes. It is not about shyness and whatever you do, don't do an
icebreaker. It is important to work with the chaos/order.

Maybe there is some pre-work you could do differently. Was the topic one
that people had passion for or was it an artificial topic? I find that I
work a lot to get the right theme/question and that this makes a big
difference.

Birgitt

Birgitt Bolton
Dalar Associates/Change Team Canada
55 Ravina Cres., Ancaster, Ontario, Canada L9G 2E8
phone: 905-648-5775    fax: 905-648-2262



----------
> From: Ingrid Olausson <ingrid.olausson at pi.se>
> To: OSLIST at LISTSERV.IDBSU.EDU
> Subject: Preconference work
> Date: June 25, 1998 5:24 AM
>
> What happens if nobody comes forward to announce issues? I have always
had faith that this will never occur - and that is what I tell clients when
they ask this question. But in the last OS with 240 people this was about
to happen. It took several minutes to get 3 issues on the bulletin board.
We had already told them that they couldnt leave the conference complaining
that their issue didn't come up, there was only one person to blame etc.
The group was extremely shy and people didn´t want to speak in public.
Specially not in a microphone. And they didn´t want to step into the
circle. We had to meet them with the microphone, or read the issues for
them. At last we had 22 issues on the wall. But it took a long time.
> My question is: would it be a good thing to break the group into pairs or
smaller group to talk for a few minutes about topics? Just to break the
ice. Or perhaps a preconference discussion on the network? The problem is
that you don't know before the conference how they will react. I have seen
many conferences where the people just throw themselves into the process.
> Ingrid



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