OST as a coaching and visioning tool

[Chris Corrigan]

Colleagues:

I'm at the tail end of a great week.  I am in Winnipeg, Manitoba with
a team of three other facilitators at a national training conference
for people involved in Aboriginal early childhood education.  We've
been running seven Open Space workshops over the four days we've been
here.  There are notes at the openspaceworld wiki, if you are
interested.  You can find the link from my homepage at
http://www.chriscorrigan.com in the "What's New" section.

One of my colleagues is also a sometime client of mine, in charge of a
large transition team in British Columbia that is designing a regional
authority structure to govern Aboriginal child welfare.  It's a huge
task.  For some time now we have been using Open Space to work with
the communities around crafting structure and service delivery models.
 My colleague is very conversant in the language and ideas of Open
Space and is always trying to build them into the work he is doing.

Today he facilitated his first open space (he did great) and this gave
us an opportunity to talk deeply about what it was like to manage from
a position of "holding space."  We did a little exercise together once
the groups were meeting.  I asked him to look very hard at what he was
seeing in the room and tell me what he saw.  I wrote down the list as
he noticed things: the groups are all engaged, there is lots of space
in the room and only some of it is being used, there is activity at
the edges and emptiness sin the middle, people are using technology
that is appropriate to the task and so on.

I asked him to step outside the room and tell me what he saw.  From
outside he said that it was hard to tell what was going on.  When he
got right inside, sitting in with a group, he was interested in how
engaged they were and how there didn't seem to be a world outside of
the conversation.

I asked him how he felt and he talked about the struggle with control
he was having as a facilitator, identifying where it hurt, where his
buttons were being pushed.  He noticed that his role was very
different from the one he occupies at work where he is supposed to be
in charge of the process.  Most profoundly he noticed that, although
his organization back home was known as "an authority" the actual
authority in the room lay with the participants.

At the end of this 30 minute exercise in seeing and sensing, I gave
him the list of the 40 or so things he had noticed and wrote at the
top "A vision for my organization in ten years."  He immediately
recognized that what we were seeing in this small 3 hour OST event was
exactly the kind of organization he wanted to being working towards.
He recognized his role in the vision too, and realized that the
emotions he was feeling holding space were those he was blocking by
exerting a little more control at work.  We talked about the list a
little more and discovered some questions that we could ask his
stakeholders back home, question s that would propel the system
forward to an evolving, emergent Open Space..

I thought I would share this with you as an idea to try with sponsors
you work with, especially those who have expressed an attraction to
OST and can see that it might lead to organizational change.  By
helping to guide their experience of really seeing an OST event,
questions arise that propel thinking towards manifesting the feel and
spirit of the event in the institutional setting later on.

Cheers,

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

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

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