MG Taylor and DesignShop Events - a step on the OS continuum or something completely different?

[Chris Corrigan]

I have no experience with DesignShop or their principles, so I Googled
it and found their book, Leaping the Abyss is online in its entirety:

http://www.foresight.org/SrAssoc/99Gathering/lta_toc.html

I have only taken a cursory glance through some of the chapters, and I
find myself agreeing with a lot of what they say about chaos,
complexity, self-organization, emergence, empowerment, collaboration
and so on.

So far I can't figure out why they don't use Open Space. It does look
like they use this process to acheive specific outcomes though, like
cost cutting for example.  And interestingly, participants talk about
"feeling empowered" as in "getting people to feel empowered" but none
of them have used the language I have heard in OST:  "I am empowered."

Here are the DesignShop axioms:

    1. The future is rational only in hindsight.
    2. You can't get there from here but you can get here from there.
    3. Discovering you don't know something is the first step to knowing it.
    4. Everything someone tells you is true: they are reporting their
experience of reality.
    5. To argue with someone else's experience is a waste of time.
    6. To add someone else's experience to your experience--to create
a new experience--is possibly valuable.
    7. You understand the instructions only after you have assembled
the red wagon.
    8. Everyone in this room has the answer. The purpose of this
intense experience is to stimulate one, several, or all of us to
extract and remember what we already know.
    9. Creativity is the elimination of options.
    10. If you can't have fun with the problem, you will never solve it.
    11. The only valid test of an idea, concept or theory is what it
enables you to do.
    12. In every adverse condition there are hundreds of possible solutions.
    13. You fail until you succeed.
    14. Nothing fails like success.

Again...cute but not much to quibble with, much like our own four
principles and one law.  So I wonder why they use all the bells and
whistles, and what that does for a client organization?  Is it about
Harrison's observation that more stuff justifies the price tag, or is
there something else...the illusion or reality of control that makes
people comfortable with a DesignShop event?

I'm musing openly, but I'm genuinely curious.  It seems that OST and
DesignShop start from the same basic field and exit from opposite
gates.   What's going on here?  Anyone experienced both processes and
care to comment?

Chris


-------------------------
CHRIS CORRIGAN
Consultation - Facilitation
Open Space Technology

Weblog: http://www.chriscorrigan.com/parkinglot
Site: http://www.chriscorrigan.com

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