Story of a powerful 1.5 day open space (long)

chris weaver chris at springbranch.net
Sun Jan 30 07:07:31 PST 2005


Chris, thank you for telling the story of this powerful event, and for
sharing the circumstances and design choices (all notable for their
simplicity) that led to such alchemy.  Will you tell us another story?  It
sounds as though the sponsoring agencies (as well as whoever determines how
UAS funds are used) were in an uncommon place of trust rather than of
fear/control.  Will you tell us the story of the development of this trust
capacity?  I'm curious about the cultural & political elements of the story
but moreso about what in your own practice as a consultant was helpful in
generating trust.

Chris

> From: Chris Corrigan <chris.corrigan at gmail.com>
> Reply-To: chris at chriscorrigan.com
> Date: Thu, 27 Jan 2005 15:26:13 -0800
> To: OSLIST at LISTSERV.BOISESTATE.EDU
> Subject: [OSLIST] Story of a powerful 1.5 day open space (long)
>
> 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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