OST as a halfway technology and other thoughts/questions

[Raffi Aftandelian]

Harrison, when you unexpectedly spilled the phrase 1/2way technology I understood that to mean that it gets us only part of the way. Great ideas are generated, probably great plans, but OST by itself is no guarantor that the "planned" change will happen. It was as if you were hinting that maybe the next step is another technology, maybe like OST or a logical extension of it that takes us all the way, something that allows us to be the planned change already. That's the letdown that I think some feel who have participated in OST: maybe there's Herbalife-like excitement (indeed one Russian colleague compared the excitement generated by OST with the worked up state of those who have gotten into selling Herbalife products; for those who are unfamiliar with Herbalife, it's a multi-level marketing scheme. Curiously, after putting down OST, a year or so later he admitted it indeed has value.) Or does such a technology already exist and I/we are not aware of it?

OST has helped me see that the answers are inside all of us already, it's about phrasing the question right.

                                                                                                                    ***

I was vindicated recently. A colleague of mine who runs an NGO that runs victim-offender mediation programs participated in an OS I had written about. I ran an OS for his wife's NGO, which deals with teenagers with substance abuse issues. He was not at the OS in the beginning, came late. But he was full of irony about the technology: "what a great job. You just walk in, announce the space is open, you sit around. then pronounce the space closed and get paid for it."

Later I learned he did see the value of OST (he did not share this with me directly) and plans on using OS at an international restorative justice conference to be held in Moscow in June...This will be an opportunity for everyone to at least spend a little time discussing other issues at the conference. 

He has scheduled 2 1/2 hours for this OS, to be held towards the end of the conference. The rest of the multi-day conference will be in traditional format, with plenaries and other assorted (yawn) old paradigm goodies.

I am curious, those who have scheduled or seen mini-OS's within a larger event, how necessary do you think it is to necessarily do the whole circle walk, attention to breath, and other things to open the space? Is it necessarily to even sit in a circle? My hunch is if people have already worked together for more than a day that the space is already open. I have already participated in a fully open OS before within a multi-day conference (this was with Intertraining, the professional association of trainers and consultants that Michael Pannewitz and Jo Toepfer trained in OST. Almost everyone had at least participated in an OS, if they hadn't led one already.)

Sending circles of clarity from a cool and overcast Moscow,
Raffi (Aftandelian)



*
*
==========================================================
OSLIST at LISTSERV.BOISESTATE.EDU
------------------------------
To subscribe, unsubscribe, change your options,
view the archives of oslist at listserv.boisestate.edu:
http://listserv.boisestate.edu/archives/oslist.html

To learn about OpenSpaceEmailLists and OSLIST FAQs:
http://www.openspaceworld.org/oslist
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.openspacetech.org/pipermail/oslist-openspacetech.org/attachments/20040514/361a92ca/attachment-0015.htm>