a note from the trenches

[Joelle Lyons Everett]

In another "note from the trenches," I co-facilitated a short Open Space on
Monday with an ODN chapter.

There were a few challenges--I was teaming with a very competent facilitator
who had never facilitated an Open Space, and had only participated in brief
meetings using part of the whole OS design.  Time was short, under 2 hours,
and the client (the outgoing chapter president) had a strong need to see
movement toward implementing ideas.

We both learned a lot from OSList discussions in the past two or three weeks,
expecially the conversations on short OS, OS within another meeting,
assumptions about OST, and nonconverging.  And decided that OS really was
appropriate, even with the short time.  We used Michael's nonconverging
model, somewhat abbreviated, and the change of focus for the second round of
sessions worked quite well.

We saw a lot of chaos, a lot of self-organizing (after a few requests that
started "Don't you think we should. . ."), a lot of energy, and some
interesting and new ideas.  One group worked on the topic, "What can we learn
from chaos science?"

And the closing circle, much of which happened after the ending time, was
very thoughtful, very honest--and welcomed by a number of people, whose hope
for the organization was to build more community.

Several times in the planning stages, we reminded ourselves of the advice
posted here recently to "just say Yes," and it was good advice!

Thanks to all of you for your words of experience and your generous spirits.

Joelle

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