Opening Space "in house"

[Harrison Owen]

At 11:46 PM 1/25/00 -0500, you wrote:
>Hello Kerry,
>and thank you for your story. I am eager to hear a bit more and wonder if
>the action follow up was actually followed up with. And how did the
>multi-language situation work out with the follow up.
>
>I have not had successful multi-language open space event. The multi
>language events I have done  have appeared successful at the time because
>people of all languages understood the process (with the help of
>translators), posted topics and had discussions. However, deep
>disappointment was happening underneath. I live in Canada where the
>predominate language is English, a second official language of French, and
>then many, many other language contributions with clusters depending on
>geographic area. The problem which came clear in every multi language Open
>Space I have done as reported at the end or after the fact is that the
>people of languages other than English (English was the majority) attended
>sessions in any language including English and found ways to make it work.
>English speaking persons, almost always attended only sessions conducted in
>English and made no effort to participate in sessions conducted in other
>languages.
*************************
I can certainly see the problem, but I wonder whether it has more to do with
the politics of Canada than the capacity of Open Space to function well in a
multi-lingual environment. It occurs to me that the experience I have had,
which has been largely positive,  occurred in situations where: a) Language was
not politically "loaded." b) No single language held total dominance. c) Where
the issue at hand was of sufficient concern that folks just naturally ploughed
through the language barrier. They were more concerned with the resolution of
issues than in how somebody talked.  As an example, ACCOR Hotels did an Open
Space several years ago. The company is French, and we were working in France.
but the participants were drawn from all over the world. Language represented
included, French, English, German, Dutch, Portuguese, and Spanish. I did not do
a careful analysis -- but as near as I can tell, sessions were done in all
languages and combinations. To be fair, this was a very international crew with
multiple languages available to each person. But the point is that the language
of choice was always the one that worked to advance their collective interests,
and nobody seemed hung up on using "their" language.

Perhaps, in a situation like Canada some headway could be made by simply owning
the problem to begin with and challenging folks to cross language barriers,
even as they might cross political, institutional, and personal barriers. Which
I guess is what Open Space is all about. Above all, Be Prepared to Be
Surprised. Who knows, people might learn something.

Harrison



Harrison Owen
7808 River Falls Drive
Potomac, MD 20854
USA
phone 301-469-9269
fax 301-983-9314
website
www.mindspring.com/~owenhh
Open Space Institute websites
www.openspaceworld.org
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.openspacetech.org/pipermail/oslist-openspacetech.org/attachments/20000126/1c79b358/attachment-0017.htm>