DesignShop and Group Genius

Thu Feb 24 14:21:21 PST 2005

You are right Chris -- really good stuff. I particularly liked --

"Cutting down to ten hours on the last day means we lose 20% of the result
of that one day. No-you lose 80% of the total result. He's not seeing the
effect on the brain, the nonlinearity of the situation, the discontinuity of
the result. What you can achieve in a one-day event is not one-third of what
you can achieve over three days-it is more like one-tenth.

Bryan Coffman, who has facilitated DesignShop events for over ten years for
organizations ranging from the Commissioner of the IRS to components of Walt
Disney World, agrees:

    Only a small percentage of people will break through to enhanced
creativity during a one-day session. They have not had the benefit of
sleeping on the problem two nights, not been forced to work hard on it from
different vantage points. They have had time to come in, listen politely,
and go home.

    "Sleeping on the problem" is a deliberate use of time as a
problem-solving technique. You've spent the day in "accelerated learning" or
"immersion learning," loading up your head with complexity, new information,
new paradigms, and vast new sets of tools to apply to your problem. That
night's sleep will shift the learning into long-term memory. When you are
handed a creative challenge at 8 AM, your mind comes to work with a
different integrated .i.ol kit;tool kit, and perhaps with a restructured
view of the world and the problem than you had the day before.

    The only way you totally immerse in working with a challenge is when you
have an opportunity to get away from the mundane; to step away from the
habits, thought patterns, and tools we use during our standard days; to see
a wide variety of viewpoints.

    The long hours give you enough time to try out, use up, exhaust, and
discard habits and standard ways of doing things that haven't been capable
of solving the problem. The long hours give you the time to move into trying
out new, experimental forms of problem-solving. You can even use the long
hours as a way to relax self-imposed rules that are holding you back-you can
try out an idea without being so nervous about the listener's response. You
can break taboos with excuse of fatigue, relax with fatigue, become more
open to information, including information from your unconscious.

    Dissolving old structures and reformulating new ones is part of the
creative process. It is, quite literally, the chemistry of a solution."

Harrison

Harrison Owen
7808 River Falls Drive
Potomac, Maryland   20845
Phone 301-365-2093

Open Space Training www.openspaceworld.com
Open Space Institute www.openspaceworld.org
Personal website http://mywebpages.comcast.net/hhowen/index.htm
OSLIST at LISTSERV.BOISESTATE.EDU
To subscribe, unsubscribe, change your options, view the archives Visit:
http://listserv.boisestate.edu/archives/oslist.html

-----Original Message-----
From: OSLIST [mailto:OSLIST at LISTSERV.BOISESTATE.EDU] On Behalf Of Chris
Corrigan
Sent: Thursday, February 24, 2005 3:00 PM
To: OSLIST at LISTSERV.BOISESTATE.EDU
Subject: DesignShop and Group Genius

Hi folks:

A while ago we had a conversation here about MGTaylor's DesignShop
process.  Today I found this link
http://www.foresight.org/SrAssoc/99Gathering/lta_chapter03.html which
has a lot of insight both into the DesignShop process, but also into
why things like time matter in processes like the ones we use.

I'm sure some of the conversations with managers recounted in the
story will resonate with those of you that have been told to shave
your OST event down to a few hours, from a full day, as if time
doesn't really matter.

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

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

*
*
==========================================================
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

*
*
==========================================================
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

>From  Thu Feb 24 15:11:59 2005
Message-Id: <THU.24.FEB.2005.151159.0800.>
Date: Thu, 24 Feb 2005 15:11:59 -0800
Reply-To: chris at chriscorrigan.com
To: OSLIST <OSLIST at LISTSERV.BOISESTATE.EDU>
From: Chris Corrigan <chris.corrigan at gmail.com>
Subject: Re: DesignShop and Group Genius
In-Reply-To: <008101c51abf$2dc9e910$6501a8c0 at harrison>
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit

That was exactly the part I thought you might like...

Cheers,

Chris

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

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

*
*
==========================================================
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