AW: 2108 -- Remember the Number

[Birgitt Williams]

Dear Harrison and Michael,
On my recent visit to Germany to have the privilege of working with two
groups of people learning how to work with Open Space Technology and the
Conscious Open Space Organization, your 2108 person OST meeting was, as
anticipated, a subject of great interest in the groups. Fortunately we had
the blessing of having Erich Kolenaty amongst us for the one group and he
treated us to the slide show of the event. This was of course excellent, and
made even more interesting by Erich's comments so that we could understand
the event a little more from the "design" perspective.

The group raised a number of questions that we hope we can do some learning
from you about.
1. The next time, would you have had participants announce their topics or
would you have left the announcing part out? What happened to the energy
when this part took so long (about two hours?)?
2. The next time, would you limit the number of topics as you did this time.
Your agenda wall with its very clear organization for topics  was
interesting but it is my understanding that you planned for 160 topics but
many more were generated and there was no planned way to deal with them. It
didn't look like the agenda wall left any room for the "unplanned". And yet,
maybe limiting the topics was necessary.
3. The next time, would you have used cushions on the floor as you did to
accomodate the number of people. We thought that there was probably a lot of
discomfort esp when we became aware of how long people had to be in their
seats for the agenda building.
4. The handwritten reports and then enlarged by photocopying for posting
seemed to work. Do you recommend this to others? Any glitches? How was the
actual book of proceedings created?
5. Could one of you have facilitated this meeting on your own or did it
really require the two of you to "open" and then "hold" the space. What was
your reflection about it being so much male energy in the facilitation--two
men opening the space instead of one male and one female? Did you feel that
sharing the opening of the space was a positive effect on your own energy or
did co-facilitating deflect some of your energy to your partner?
6. What is the real advantage in a large OST meeting such as this one? What
was accomplished that could be cited as  tangible results? Would it have
been better to break the large group into smaller ie:600 person simultaneous
OST meetings? Would that have been better for the participants. We noted in
the pictures that some of the breakout groups had hundreds of participants
and we were imagining that it would not be very fulfilling---but Erich
pointed out that likely these in fact were like classes continuing on with
masters from the "constellation work" so they were not meant to be really
interactive.
7. In what circumstances would you recommend such a large OST meeting and
what could the client expect to achieve?

Well, that is it for the questions that I said that I would bring to you,

Thanks for helping us with understanding this better. Again, we think it is
a very valuable teaching story.

Blessings,
Birgitt

 -----Original Message-----
From: OSLIST [mailto:OSLIST at LISTSERV.BOISESTATE.EDU]On Behalf Of Erich
Kolenaty
Sent: Monday, May 12, 2003 4:30 AM
To: OSLIST at LISTSERV.BOISESTATE.EDU
Subject: Re: AW: 2108 -- Remember the Number



  Hi all!

  Harrison wrote

  There is never a point to making people uncomfortable. And for sure if the
resources (chairs, flip charts etc) are available, certainly they should be
used.  But as you noted above -- very little of all that is essential. My
questions are always -- What is possible? and What is appropriate ? And I
know from long experience (sorry for the "elder" statement) that the people
will not only survive -- but thrive. There is another consideration: The
more you do for somebody, the less they have to do for themselves. I am by
no means advocating being hard-nosed and nasty, but I have often noted that
adversity is often the mother of invention. Adversity can even heighten and
sharpen the experience.


  And here we are close together again:
  It is very important to be aware what is really essential. To know what to
to keep carrefully in, anyway. Würzburg for example showed, that it is not
esssential to provide chairs for this kind of folks.

  My philosophie from my work as trainer-trainer always was  "Never do, what
people can do by themselves". Sounds a little bit like your formula, isn't
it?

  But we know, that one of the conditions of self-organization is a
"nutrient enviroment". And here we come again to the question what is
possible and appropriate in a certain context.

  For sure it would not been appropriate to skip, for example, the catering
supply for  2108, though in my opinion catering is not essential to Open
Space. People would have survived one day without food easily, maybe a
little uncomfortable, but would have survived.

  So what is appropriate? It is appropriate to leave the comfortzone and
bring in challenges to stimulate people to move by themselves.  But I would
not support a philosophy of slimming down to nothing, without looking at the
circumstances

  Erich


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