Principles, process and people

[Beck György]

OSLIST Digest - 13 Mar 2005 to 14 Mar 2005 (#2005-72)Dear Harrison,

I follow your words: if it works, do it.

Recently I facilitated an OS meeting for 40 people of a company.

The company is in a quite bad moral shape so all the case to help them "wake up and walk" was very sensitive.
That was the reason I accepted to use a directed invitation instead of voluntary attendence.
These people were not practiced neither in group work nor even to listen to each other. 
After the OS introduction they made the agenda. In every time period they could put 6 issues on the wall. In almost all of the time periods they have put 5-6 issues and later they worked on 2 or 3. There were some more burining issues, where the number of people were around 30 in the "small" groups.

In one of the periods, when the dedicated time has expired, I suggested to choose the next topic, to tell the truth I interfered to finish the discussion. Before blaming me for abusing the principles you also have to know that the "culture" of communication in this group of people was (is?) that if they think of the "bean soup", they talk about "catering" in general.

I could not allow them to realize, they won't get any result to talk paralelly. 

Because of (my) need for control I inserted a feedback time after every two time periods, where they could raise new issues and put on those they found important.

Before the last period I realized that there will be an issue, that concerned almost the whole group. I offered them, if they wish, to moderate this discussion. They accepted it so I moderated this session that was planned 1,5 hour instead of the originally planned 1 hour.

I used the classical nominal group method to collect all the partial issues belonging to the main issue. They collected some 40 post-it "issues", belonging to the main one. After clarification of the "bean-soups" they made groups of the related post-its. Then I suggested to choose one for discussion and take home all the others for further discussions.

Since we were close to the end of the whole program, there was no time to open the space later, after getting a way of solution for problem solving. 

I showed them a problem solving method for the issue chosen. They could end up with specific results and they were happy with the solution. 

I told you this story because of my doubts, how else could I have done it.  


Regards, Gyuri









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