Warm Up

Ros Crompton roscrom at alphalink.com.au
Wed May 2 16:07:02 PDT 2001


Hi Viv and All,

One of the best things about OST is that the warm-up is inherent on the
process. I remember thinking this last year when I did the training sessions
with Birgit in Brisbane. And the warm-up starts before the Space is opened.
It begins when I receive the notice of training or the invitation to attend
and I make the decision to be there - to be one of the "right people".

It continues in the period leading up to the OS when I see it in my diary,
meet someone else who will be there, anticipate useful outcomes, and so on.
Evening before story-telling warms people up to themselves, the constituting
of this group and their capacity to share. And then the flow is really going
with opening the space so that after the ritual of walking and talking and
engaging people in the way of it, the pens and paper are really beckoning.

If irrelevant "games" are introduced or unexpected happenings cut across the
natural flow of Open Space, then the warm-up is compromised and people can
feel all kinds of things - bored, shocked, abandoned, lost creatively,
angry, bewildered, ..... depending .....  The warm-up is alive and very
responsive, and ebbs and flows naturally. It is also possible to cut across
expectations, disrupt important themes, and even subtly exclude some
sub-group by disrupting the warm-up period.

So the psychodramatic concept of warm-up is a great way to think about the
process in Open Space - it helps me to appreciate how elegantly and simple
complex and complete OS is. There's no need to add to it, but rather attend
to all of it. It's been said that there is no such thing as resistive
people, just inadequate warm-up which encourages me to think about the
nature of the process rather than hang extra things on it just in case. I
guess we can get hooked into adding something to warm people up to something
and forget to tease out whether it's already there.

Well, that's a bit of a ramble - hope it adds something to the discussion.
Cheers, Ros.

*
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