Preconference work

[Larry Peterson]

I agree with Birgitt Ingrid. Let the silence go as long as necessary. It
does say a great deal about the sponsors and the extent to which they are
trusted. That pre-conference work is critical to help them decided to open
the space and be clear as to how open it is, and to identify theme. It may
take some work with some of the possible particpants before the event to
test the theme if the sponsors are totally out of touch.

Even with the very shy Cree in Northen Quebec, the right theme and openness
of the sponsor created a flood of people. See OS Canada newsletter on the
Global OS web site for details.

Larry

Larry Peterson
Associates in Transformation
41 Appleton Ave., Toronto, ON,
Canada, M6E 3A4
Tel:/Fax: 416-653-4829

lpasoc at inforamp.net
http://www.inforamp.net/~lpasoc


-----Original Message-----
From:   Birgitt Bolton [SMTP:birgitt at WORLDCHAT.COM]
Sent:   Wednesday, June 24, 1998 8:22 AM
To:     OSLIST at LISTSERV.IDBSU.EDU
Subject:        Re: Preconference work

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