Emergency Response Team - Thanks and update

Blake Mills MmmBlake at aol.com
Thu Jan 17 21:21:39 PST 2002


Many thanks to the 10 or so people who responded to my panic attack last week
at midnight about convergence with 130 people  This is an update to what
happened in the convergence.

Firstly, your immediate response late at night (3 AM when I got back to my
hotel room) made my heart flush with gratitude, warmth, and love...an
incredible feeling of not being alone in the world.  It immediately relaxed
me and reminded me to trust my intuition (along with a couple of ideas
offline that I ended up incorporating.)  It brought me fully into this
wonderful space I have been skirting around.

To refresh memories of this OS:  130 fast-paced, high tech people got
together to hold a day and a half OS at the end of a week long conference of
900 people.   For the most part, they are all working 'virtually' across the
US and in 4 other countries.   Theme was "How can we meet our goals this
year?"   Within 15 minutes after I finished the opening, 32 topics were
posted and they were hard at work, seated in self-designed circles around the
room and in the atrium of the hotel.  (One quote I like to use in the opening
is "Excellence is not possible with a disengaged heart.") It was truly
amazing the stampede of topics and organization and get-down-to-it-energy.
Five other topics were added during the day, one of which was "nap."  There
were six 1 hour 15 minute sessions with 1/2 hour for lunch (buffet).  The
client was worried few people would post topics, even tho he had hosted an OS
for 35 people last year.  His worry (possible career limiting decision to
hold OS for 130) bounced onto me and then ricocheted onto this list.  Need an
anxiety defense shield from now on.

Convergence:  Start time was 9 AM

8 am to 9: Informal walk-the-wall to see what happened in all the groups.  I
posted whatever came in the previous night, handwritten or typed with a blank
page beside it. They were instructed to review topics and add any additional
thoughts, names or hyperlinks to other topics or people within or outside the
company.  I made only 10 hard copies of the session notes and placed them in
the middle of the circle. The people who partied the night before really
appreciated the sit down review time with the hard copies.

We circled-up at 9 AM with directions-they were to meet in the groups that
they wished to work with and decide the goal and the very next action step.
After 45 minutes, we circled-up again and each session's action step was
announced by the convener.  (a little boring for me, but others liked hearing
the "whole picture")  We closed with "What was most meaningful for you this
week?"  I thought many would pass because there were planes to catch, few
did. The majority of comments were about the "face-time" they had with their
counterparts, some they had never met.  One comment "I got a lot of work done
without having my email inbox filled!".   They really appreciated the meeting
format.  After it was all over with, someone came up and told my client that
next time she wanted the rest of the conference to be involved.

Documentation:  This company is going to a "paperless" workplace, so
conveners were to send an email (in template format) to my client after the
OS and it would be placed on an internal website or emailed to everyone.

Thank you, Harrison, for your brilliance.
Thank you, emergency response team, for your heart help.
Blake

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