OS in oral cultures

[Bernd Weber]

Joelle,

thank you for the information who has experiences.
I have to admit, that the consultant told me after reading my first
posting to the group, that I had not really understood his doubts.
He had simply meant that it would be impossible to aply the OST
"standard format", not that he did not believe that an adaptation to
the specific conditions of mental/f2f-communicative cultures. So I am
sorry that I presented his position wrong in the group.

As to reporting: there is a regular monitoring going on during the
projects which already works quite well, so this is something I can
leave to the client, aside my regular OD-memos to the client
(1percontract) and aside from sometims extra feedback interventions
into the system which I think necessary from the OD-consultants point
of view.

You wrote: "But I like the idea of keeping everything congruent with
the participants' normal modes of communication and not imposing a
whole structure of new requirements". I fully agree and think Lewin's
"Go with the flow" dictum is especially useful when applied to the
changing systems' modes of communication and if you really want to
have sustainability, meaning that the change/development/learning of
the system is not loosing its drive when the external input system
(e.g. money, technology and consultancy in north-south development
cooperation) withdraws. This is one of the weak points of the
development cooperation interventions: if you look at the immedeate
impact, it is usually great, some years after the projects: 'had
there been something?' ;-)

Thanks for telling me that John, Judith and Chris have experiences
with OS/OST aplications in conditions similar to mine. I already
contacted John (on basis of Michael Herman's hint).

Are there others?

Bernd



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weberb at gmx.at, on 18.09.2002 at 06:31:11 (GMT/UT + 02:00)
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Bernd Weber
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On Tue, 17 Sep 2002 14:13:08 EDT, Joelle Lyons Everett wrote:
>John and his colleagues have done it in Haiti, Judith has done it, I
>know that Chris has used a similar format for some OS gatherings at
>the rural conference center in North Carolina.

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