Open space for time management

Harrison Owen owenhh at mindspring.com
Thu Aug 2 04:29:42 PDT 2001


At 02:24 PM 7/30/2001 +0200, you wrote:
>Dear all
>Client asks me to do a workshop on time & project management, setting
>prioritis, personal effectiveness.
>Any examples, things to think about
>Regards
>
>Rob Stroober

**************************************
Open Space could be very interesting in this situation. But first I would
want to ask, "Does anybody care?" I mean really care. Of course the client
does (presumably), but what about those who come? If this is one of those
"Improve Productivity Gigs" where folks are ordered to come in order to
enhance the bottom line...sorts of thing, then the possibility of really
opening space will be limited. To say the least. No passion. But I can
certainly see that folks  could care. If it were me, however, I wouldn't do
an Open Space on  "time & project management, setting priorities, personal
effectiveness" -- I would do an Open Space around some project that they
needed to manage, where some real work needed to get done. Instead of
talking about all of the above, they would be doing it. More to the point,
I am sure the folks would experience a means for project and time
management combined with a powerful sense of personal effectiveness that
would simply blow them away. At the end, it would be appropriate to ask in
the closing circle -- what happened. Reflection as it were. The only
problem I can foresee with such an approach is the embarrassing one of
suddenly noticing that the group had been wasting an incredible amount of
time previously trying to manage stuff. Open Space works, of course,
because it establishes the initiating conditions for self organization. And
a self-organizing system, we all know, is a wonder of empowerment,
efficiency and effectiveness. And the management function is minimal to
non-existent. We know this simply because every time we open space it is
proved once again. Could be fun


Harrison Owen
7808 River Falls Drive
Potomac, MD 20854 USA
phone 301-469-9269
fax 301-983-9314
Summer Phone 207-763-3261
Summer Address
189 Beaucaire Ave.
Camden, ME 04843
Personal website www.mindspring.com/~owenhh
Open Space Institute website www.openspaceworld.org
Open Space Training www.openspaceworld.com
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