A Story from OZ

rnorris at digital.net rnorris at digital.net
Thu Apr 13 16:21:27 PDT 2000


This is great -- but for me
>the math would be harder then the Open Space. But there was a time when I
>did an Open Space for a $300 million company -- small but quite well known.
>The CFO was furious. We basically closed the company for two whole days. He
>figured it cost him a Million a day. Anyhow, but the end of the first day,
>in addition to a whole mess of other stuff, the folks had designed a new
>product (including manufacturing and marketing plans) and re-designed their
>inventory system. The CFO figured the first was worth $24 million a year,
>and the second saved $4 million.

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Harrison,
Was this The Rockport Company?  Is so, may I use your comments as a part of
my research paper.  Not much reported on value in monetary terms that I can
see from my data.  A whole bunch of other types of repoted value though.

One trend I have noticed in the data, is a large fall off in reported value
over time from immediate value to post OS event value.  This matches the
basic concepts of "dissipative systems". My thought is that Open Space
could be used as a "snap shot" of the real culture systems in an
organization and not the "masked" culture systems that orgs would believe
they are. Maybe I am seeing a superb potential in OS for conducting ongoing
and fluid org cultural gap analysis (conducted in OS), particularly if
organizations reach a state of continious change...at the speed of thought?
This "real time" gap analysis could be useful to help see the places where
the loss of energy (dissipation) is or may be influencing or impacting the
stability of the org.   OS could be a prepetual temperature guage to
forecast if the organization is cooking or may possibly be cooking at or
about right temperature...simmering, boiling etc. for the org to change.

Come to think of it, I've never been in a stable organization and don't
know of any except those that are now dead (entropy set in).


Rich Norris
Satellite Beach, Florida
(407)779-0531
<rnorris at digital.net>



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