No subject

[Chris Corrigan]

Hi Kim:

A couple of thoughts.

Kim Willing wrote:

> Also, even if only 250 come to the Friday morning session, would it be
> unwieldy to use 15 dots each, and given that there may be many more topics
> than with a smaller group, I'm wondering whether it might be better to ask
> people to just list their top 10 (rather than 5) issues and to give 1 dot
> to each vs. ranking them. The counting of dots has to happen fairly quickly
> once the voting is done and I don't want to make it impossible.
>

Unless there is a need for some kind of ranking, would you consider
using non-convergence?  That is, forming action groups without having
the vote take place?

Basically the way I have been doing it is this way:

1.      Hand out reports and invite people to take time to read them, same as
convergence.  Give them one further instruction: invite them to identify
something in the proceedings that really speaks to them and think about
how this might get taken out of the room, into the real world.  It
doesn't have to be one topic, or even a logical grouping of topics.  It
can be a subtle thread that seems implicit in a few topics and is crying
out to be drawn forth.

2.      Open Space but this time, ask for people to convene groups focused on
ACTION.  Give them no more than an hour for their conversations.

3.      Hand out session report sheets with these headings: Action Group
Name, Convener, Participants, What we will do, Who else we will bring
in, When we shall meet again.  Use your own headings to capture relevant
data.  I ask the conveners to focus their groups on these things.
Answering the last one is all you really need to make a plan to get it
out of the room.

4.      I usually invite brief reports on the actions to be undertaken in the
closing circle, or just before.  This allows people to proclaim the news
and attract any others who might have missed the session.

There are all kinds of reasons I use this process instead of voting, and
you may find some resonance with it.  It works very well, and is very
satisfying to participants.  Most of the time I get a lot of surprise
that such concrete action can come out of so much conversation.  I think
it has to do with the fact that people are identifying real work that
needs to be done rather than slotting themselves into groups based on
how the votes fall out, in which one topic may receive dozens of low
priority votes, meaning that there is little actual passion from any one
person to make something happen.  In non-convergence, action happens
because people are willing to step up right now and make it happen.
Sometimes those actions can't be predicted by the results in the
proceedings; they seem truly emergent.

Anyway, there's an idea for you.

Chris

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