Warm Ups, Kick Starting Slow Starters

[Harrison Owen]

Brendan -- sounds to me that you all did "workshop" the issue/question, and
it just took a little longer than you anticipated. Interestingly, I have
never had the problem you describe. Folks always know what they are talking
about -- or at least think they are talking about -- if not they would not
have come. Which makes me wonder about the real openness of the invitation.
Did they come for the question, or for some other reason?

Harrison

Harrison Owen
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-----Original Message-----
From: OSLIST [mailto:OSLIST at LISTSERV.BOISESTATE.EDU] On Behalf Of Brendan
Mckeague
Sent: Tuesday, April 18, 2006 9:25 PM
To: OSLIST at LISTSERV.BOISESTATE.EDU
Subject: Warm Ups, Kick Starting Slow Starters

After a recent 2.5 day OS with a diverse group of 35 people, from different 
(international) organisations and from about 10 different nationalities, 
the sponsor made the following comments in his reflection of the process:

We are still  working on some of the details on the follow up to the 
meeting.  It is
very pleasing to see how much follow up has been generated.  I have talked
to a
lot of people about the meeting and the process. All have been positive.
For
your consideration here are a couple of suggestions that people have
made.  I have mentioned these to you earlier I think and now I am confident
the
majority of participants would concur with them.
First, workshop the question for an hour or so at the start.  The strength
of
the meeting was that we had people with a wide range of backgrounds
and levels of understanding about the issues.  The disadvantage is that some
people with lower levels of understanding  took a day or two to work out
what
was really being discussed.  Making sure everyone had a good understanding
of
what the question really was all about would probably be useful.

My curiosity now relates to the clarity with which we had framed the 
original invitation/question - and I accept that there was a bit of 
uncertainty about getting it right (at least from where I sat)....
and
do participants sometimes expect that a certain level of clarification is 
usually provided at the start of conventional conferences - 
through   sponsor 'distillation' or inputs and thus get 'lazy' about 
working it out for themselves right from the start?  On thinking of some of 
my own past experiences, I've arrived at many a conference expecting to be 
slowly and gently 'fed and led' into the working mode...not just left to 
work it all out for myself from the beginning..

Any thoughts?

Cheers
Brendan
is that 

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