SV: Visions for Sweden?

Thomas Herrmann thomas at openspaceconsulting.com
Thu Jan 27 13:09:55 PST 2005


Great Michael, please make sure the folks come the 5th! I made a mistake
regarding the date, anyhow there is no Saturday 3rd so I guess they´ll
notice. It seems people are interested, registrations keep coming.
Right now I´m on the train back home from Stockholm where I had a
pre-meeting preparing the large event I mentioned earlier. 600 municipal
school "bosses". Exciting!
Kind regards
Thomas

> -----Ursprungligt meddelande-----
> Från: OSLIST [mailto:OSLIST at LISTSERV.BOISESTATE.EDU]För Pannwitz,
> Michael M
> Skickat: den 24 januari 2005 17:23
> Till: OSLIST at LISTSERV.BOISESTATE.EDU
> Ämne: Re: Visions for Sweden?
>
>
> Dear Thomas,
> hmmm, have been wondering whether I qualify as a Swede.
> And then I though, heck, all of us are Swedes!
> In that vain, I am forwarding your note to the 158 people on the
> german language open space listserve.
> Hoping you get lots of  Swedes with polish, german, english,
> slovenian, danish, norwegian, russian, indian, brazilian,
> southafrican, chinese, korean, creole, swiss....background to work
> together on creating a vision for Sweden!
> Greetings from Berlin
> mmp
>
> On Mon, 24 Jan 2005 15:32:55 +0100, Thomas Herrmann wrote:
>
> >Dear friends in Open Space
> >If you happen to be a Swede and/or interested anyway, you are
> welcome to an
> >Open Space-meeting Saturday the 3rd of March. Myself and a
> collegue invite
> >those interested in developing the theme: How can we open up space for
> >continuous dialogues about visions for Sweden?
> >
> >The meeting will be at Wendelsbergs folkhögskola, which is a
> familiar place
> >for those of you who have participated in other workshops we
> have organized
> >there. And yes, the meeting format will be Open Space Technology!
> >
> >"Another and", of course if you know anyone who shouldn´t miss this
> >opportunity, please pass the information along! Just get in
> touch with me to
> >get the full invitation (in Swedish).
> >Kind regards
> >Thomas Herrmann         Phone +46 (0)709-98 97 81
> >Open Space Consulting   Fax   +46 (0)300-713 89
> >Pensévägen 4
> >434 46 Kungsbacka, Sweden
> >Email: thomas at openspaceconsulting.com
> >www.openspaceconsulting.com
>
>
>
>
>
> Michael M Pannwitz, boscop eG i.G.
> Draisweg 1, 12209 Berlin, Germany
> ++49-30-772 8000
> www.boscop.de   www.michaelmpannwitz.de
>
> Check out the new Open Space World Map now with 158 Open Space
> Workers in 37 countries
> www.openspaceworldmap.org
>
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>From  Thu Jan 27 15:26:13 2005
Message-Id: <THU.27.JAN.2005.152613.0800.>
Date: Thu, 27 Jan 2005 15:26:13 -0800
Reply-To: chris at chriscorrigan.com
To: OSLIST <OSLIST at LISTSERV.BOISESTATE.EDU>
From: Chris Corrigan <chris.corrigan at gmail.com>
Subject: Story of a powerful 1.5 day open space (long)
Mime-Version: 1.0
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Colleagues:

Time for a story.

I am coming off a remarkable Open Space event that ranks up there with
the very best I have ever experienced.

Five years ago, my first truly big and important Open Space
facilitation was to kick of the Urban Aboriginal Strategy for
Vancouver.  This is a federal government strategy aimed at supporting
emerging solutions to the myriad of problems facing Aboriginal
populations living in Canada's larger cities.  That event brought
together 175 people in one day and set an agenda which is being
followed to this day.

Tuesday and Wednesday of this week I was privileged to work with the
urban Aboriginal community of Prince George, a smaller city (80,000)
in the northern interior of British Columbia.  The UAS has been
extended to this community now with a commitment to spend $500,000
over two years and, like we did in Vancouver five years ago, people
wanted to use open space to kick it off.

Five years ago we did a good job, but we also learned something
important.  We learned that one day of Open Space is enough to get
good discussion going but it puts a damper on the community
leadership.  The results of the Vancouver forum were taken by
government and a handful of agencies and implemented within existing
structures and processes.  Not a problem per se, but it did means that
some of these projects, especially around family support and
homelessness did suffer a little from some of the pre-existing
political battles in the community.  In Prince George we gave
ourselves a day and a half with the promise that one day would be
about dialogue and one day would be about action and project planning.
 We were committed to looking past the existing ways of doing things
and opening up ourselves to the possibility that passionate new
leadership was also out there waiting to be invited into being.

The sponsoring agencies, a loose consortium of service providers,
government and local First Nations and Metis groups set the stage for
the success of this event right off the top.  They let go of the
process.  They decided that the UAS should not be controlled by the
existing agencies and organizations, and that because we were trying
to solicit community leadership, they would truly turn this over to
the community.  That willingness and openness made a huge difference
on the day.  In our pre-meeting, phrases like "we need new ideas to
grow" and "supporting community leadership" became touchstones for the
media campaign that formed the invitation.  The sponsors stated their
desire to be completely transparent in how this process was to unfold.
 They even committed to publishing a summary of the OST results in the
local paper.  Over three weeks these messages were repeated in local
media with the starling results.  On the day 275 community members
showed up.

These were people from a variety of agencies both Aboriginal and
non-Aboriginal.  They also included regular citizens, youth, elders,
disabled folks, folks with mental illness, the poor and dyslexic and
the rich and educated.  There were entertainers, politicians, social
workers, businesspeople, athletes, activists and teachers.

At the stroke of 10:30 yesterday morning the first of 55 discussion
groups met on a huge range of issues and by the end of the day we had
a 63 page proceedings document with summaries from 41 groups.  Over
the course of the day, I caught snippets of conversation, including
yelling, quiet reflection, lots of talk in the Carrier language and at
one point an Elder stood up in one group and began to sing like a
small bird, her light song carrying over the large room we were in and
causing everyone to stop a moment and turn their attention to her.

On day two, about 100 people returned to work on projects.  We did
non-convergence, which is to say I simply opened the space again and
invited people to post invitations to work on projects based on
yesterday's discussion.  I asked for passion to be tightly bound to
responsibility on this day and invited people to be specific about
their project plans.  All the conveners knew that there was a meeting
scheduled on February 15 for follow up to which they would be invited,
and that if they got their proposals together by April 1st, the UAS
money was there to support their initiatives.

Twenty-four project postings were made and these convened into 19
groups.  The work of these groups ranges from using a mobile library
bus to encourage inner city literacy to setting up a holistic healing
centre for families, to creating a homelessness committee to starting
a forum for agencies to work together in conversation with one another
to continue to talk about ways to meet the emerging needs.  Several
project champions have no organizational affiliation, being stay at
home mothers, or teachers in an early childhood development program,
or budding writers who are trying to break into mainstream media.  All
of them found support from existing organizations and in just one and
a half hours, partnerships were made, action plans drafted and in some
cases, goals, objectives and visions were written.  One group became
so close that when they were finished, they stood in a circle for a
minute tightly holding hands and prayed together.  All of this was
self-organizing, all of it happened in Open Space.

For perhaps the first time in my life I feel like I've seen the
deepest potential of this process.  We had a sponsorship group that
was free of ties to outcomes, remarkably open to whatever might
happen.  We had a federal government department willing to take a risk
with a half million dollars - a pittance in the scheme of things, but
a huge boost to these budding consortia of passion.  And we had people
who spent a day together in a climate were there was very little nay
saying and where there was hardly a problem raised that couldn't be
addressed by someone in the room.  And we have a solid follow up plan
that embraces the project conveners and will invite them to take
charge of the process of managing this money over the two years so
that it may be used effectively to support the directions that seem to
be evolving anyway.  In fact if the money weren't there, I'm not sure
it would make much difference.  People are so eager to take
responsibility for the solution, the invitation to do so was almost
enough as it was.  It was a glorious day and a half of emergent,
chaordic leadership.

In short order I'll be posting the invitation materials (including the
radio ads), proceedings and other stuff on my website, for anyone to
look at and use.  I'll send a link to the list when it's up.

Thanks again to this community for continuing to inspire and support
my practice.  Because of you, I feel like I am able to offer a world
full of good ideas to my clients, and I know they appreciate your
wisdom being available to them.

Meegwetch,

Chris

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

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

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