Open space for military

[Esther .]

Carol:

What fun. I have written some of my musings. I haven't done open space with
the military but was involved as a subcontracted consultant to co-facilitate
a set of sessions with Canadian military personnel. The design was poor and
so the whole thing did not go well. But I learned a ton about the Canadian
military culture. So here are my thoughts. I'm extrapolating from one
three-day intensive facilitation but it taught me some stuff about the
culture that I'll never forget. But some of what I say here may be that
particular group of 300 people. Test out what I say and discard what doesn't
make sense to you.

The first thing I was struck by was how tough they are on themselves, though
they would die rather than admit it. They hold themselves to a very high
physical standard and are open and proud about that. But they hold themselves
to a very rigid standard of how okay it was to be emotionally expressive. Not
very. And some of the women were actually
opting out of the armed forces as soon as they had finished a couple of tours
of duty.

I think Open Space will be different enough that they will take to it. The
thing that you will likely find is that they will see Open Space as a "game"
whose rules they need to figure out in order to be successful at playing it.
I found the Armed Forces Staff very quick at understanding instructions (they
have to be good at that and they have to be good at giving them out) and they
will likely figure out more quickly than most groups how to take advantage of
what Open Space has to offer.

Another implication of the bit about giving instructions is that it is such a
basic skill to armed forces personnel that anyone who doesn't give the
instructions in a fluent and confident way may run the risk of being seen as
less competent. They really respect competence. Because it matters in the
field. If anyone is incompetent in the field, people die.

The personnel that I dealt with were tough physically, extremely bright, very
good at sizing people up and (in our case) unengaged. But they went through
the motions anyway because someone had told them that they had to. No one
could order them to like it or to engage other than intellectually which they
did as a point of pride.

I believe that open space will allow them the chance to engage. And, as
usual, the givens need to be very clear. Just how much power they have to
make change will have to be very understood.

One other thing, the choice of language was very important. I would get
someone to brief you on your choice of words if you haven't had previous
experience with this culture. This is true of many cultures but I found this
one less forgiving of difference: especially in an external consultant.

Having said all that, if I had the chance to do open space with them, I'd
leap at it because it would, I think, work extremely well.

Hope my limited experience is helpful.

Esther Ewing
The Change Alliance
133 Fairlawn Avenue
Toronto, Ontario M5M 1S9
416-489-5229

Assisting Individuals and Organizations to Grow Capability
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