Story and idea of another convergence and action planning approach in OS

Chris Corrigan chris at chriscorrigan.com
Wed Nov 27 10:58:54 PST 2002


Colleagues:

I'm just back from a two day strategic planning session with a report on
a non-voting application of convergence and action planning.

The group I was working with is a governance board in development.  They
are preparing to take over responsibility for child welfare services for
about 750 Aboriginal children spread over a region that includes some of
the largest urban areas in British Columbia, Canada outside of
Vancouver.  The provincial government has recently decided to create
Regional Aboriginal Authorities who will be responsible for managing
these services.  The authorities are composed of people appointed from
the regional community leadership.  At this point, the authority is only
interim, and the 15 people who gathered together were tasked with
creating a plan that would advance the establishment of the Regional
Aboriginal Authority.

Coming into the meeting, we knew a little bit about what we would like
to come out of it.  At the provincial level there are five other regions
organizing the same way and the issues they all need to deal with on a
provincial level had been grouped under the following headings:

1.      Legislation and the Service Delivery Model
2.      Labour Relations, Human Resources and Capacity Building
3.      Tripartite negotiations (between the federal government, the
provincial government and First Nations)
4.      Financial considerations and funding allocations.

The plan we were designing could be about anything, but recommendations
that touched on these four areas would be carried forward to the
provincial level negotiations.

With me so far?  Good.

A while ago I had read a suggestion here (was it from Michael Pannwitz?)
about strategic planning in Open Space that invited participants to
classify their discussions according to some predetermined categories.
It seemed like a good tool to use here.

We divided the news wall into five sections, one for each of the above
categories and one blank one.  During the opening, I opened as usual and
invited people to raise any issues that needed conversation, discussion
and resolution to be posted for inclusion in the plan.  I invited people
to hold their discussions and when they were done, to post the
proceedings in the appropriate category.  We pointed out why we had
chosen those categories and stated that anything captured under these
four areas would definitely go forward to the provincial level in
addition to being included in the regional plan.  Issues that fell
outside those categories were fine too, but would probably only stay in
the regional plan.

As the first day progressed it became clear that the discussions were
all going to fit (with a little coaxing) into three of the four topic
areas.  There were 16 discussion groups.  The proceedings were clustered
and converged as they were posted on the news wall.

On the second day, the group reviewed the news, and I invited people to
choose one of the three areas for action.  The room had flipcharts in
three corners labeled with one of the three areas.  The task was to
review the notes from each area and put some meat and action on them.
The Laws and Principles applied.  Participants chose where to go and
they worked on very concrete actions for themselves and recommendations
for the provincial body.  After about 1.5 hours (I had no predetermined
time for this) people seemed to be finished and we had short
presentations back to the group which was appropriate seeing as the
group was small, and they all needed to be somewhat up to speed about
what was being proposed.  One or two items needed consensus to move
forward and this was done with very little fuss.  Some very creative
ideas were fleshed out a little further by the larger group.

The whole process took up the morning on the second day.  It went like
this:

9 -9:30 Morning news and review of proceedings
9:30-9:45       Explanation of process and dividing into groups
9:45-11:15      Discussions and action planning
11:15-12:30     Reporting, plenary discussion and resolution of issues.

IN doing this, I wondered what it would be like in a larger meeting to
invite participants to converge topics as they were posting them to the
news wall, rather than the next day.  Next time I have a large group, I
might try placing a little sign on the news wall inviting people to
group discussion reports together if they choose to.  That way, a
converging consensus can evolve over the course of the day, people would
be encouraged to read the news wall and think about the bigger picture,
and we could start day two fresh with categories for action planning,
rather than go through the uncomfortable (to me) process of having a
group mill around at the wall, playing with topics and disturbing the
energy of that perfect second morning stillness.  Thoughts?

I found the original suggestion made here a while ago to be quite
useful, and so I just thought I'd share this application of it.

Cheers,

Chris



---
CHRIS CORRIGAN
Consultation - Facilitation
Open Space Technology

Bowen Island, BC, Canada
http://www.chriscorrigan.com
chris at chriscorrigan.com

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