Questions for OSonOS

[Tree Fitzpatrick]

I want to echo Lisa's advice reminding us that posting questions at
OSonOS (or any OS event) in-the-moment of co-creation works well.

I participated in a think tank called Spirited Business for a long
time.  Almost all participants were longtime participants in Spirited
Work, which is an ongoing COSO.  At one important, day-long planning
meeting, the morning was devoted to presenting the mission/values
statement.  The presentation was the culmination of lots of hard work
over a long period of time.  I mention this for context.

After the morning of presentation, we had agreed to spend the
afternoon in open space, letting the participants decide what to do
next after we had a concensus to adopt the misison/values statement. 
But for some reason, the person who 'facilitated' the afternoon,
decided to speed up the open space.  It was pretty obvious which
topics would be addressed in the afternoon open space so he figured he
would save some of our limited, prescious time and post the topics and
direct people to go where they wanted.

All thirty of us just sat and stared at him.  I remember my own inner
process:  I kept looking at those topics, which had no owner/convenor,
and looking some more. I couldn't figure out what had heart and
meaning for me as I looked at those pre-posted questions.    The
pre-determined quesitons had no energy for me.  And, as it turned out,
they had no energy for anyone else.  No one got up to go to any of the
offerings.

After a few moments of collective puzzlement, someone pointed out that
something was missing.  EVeryone quickly realized we had not opened
space.  And there had been no ownership of the questions.  Duh! 
Almost everyone in the room was accustomed to gathering in open space
but we had skipped a few steps thoughtlessly.

So then we quickly opened space and those who wanted to post questions
posted questions and people got to work.  The pre-posted questions
were virtually identical to the ones posted in the open space
marketplace. . . but the energy was completely different.

-- 
Warmly,
Tree Fitzpatrick

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