Warm Ups, Kick Starting Slow Starters

Christine Whitney Sanchez milagro27 at cox.net
Thu Apr 20 15:39:58 PDT 2006


Brendan, thanks for sharing your experience and asking for our reflections.
Often when an Open Space involves people from different organizations (and
especially when they come from different cultures and countries), the
sponsors and I consider the need for context building ahead of the event
and/or sometimes in the first hour or so prior to the OS meeting.  Two
examples come to mind.  

The first was a public, one-day forum on developing a community-wide
strategy for combating elder abuse.  This event was open to the public and
was co-sponsored by two organizations - a police department and the Area
Agency on Aging.  The design committee for this project decided that helping
people understand the current state around elder abuse in their city and
around the nation would elevate the discussion, and therefore began the day
with an hour of video presentations and overviews from the police and the
agency regarding their experiences.  The 160 participants seemed
appreciative of this.  But what I remember most is that after the
presentation, during a break, after the hotel staff rushed in to reconfigure
the room into our open space circles, I was meditating in a front row chair
when a participant came over to me and said, "Now, this is more like it -
I'm so much more comfortable with these circles.  This is how my community
always meets."  Turns out she was a Papago member of the Gila River Indian
Community and 'just happened' to have some sage in her backpack.  She had a
friend in the group, a Lakota Sioux, who 'just happened' to have some
sweetgrass.  And so they smudged the space (they lit the sage and sweetgrass
and walked the circles to let the smoke cleanse the space) right before the
Open Space began.  I've always thought of that incident as a different kind
of context setting.

The second example was with the 1,600+ Girl Scout delegates who had been
mailed a packet on their topic of governance and had actually been given
some training in their local councils prior to coming to the convention.
What was interesting here was that even with all that context and prep, more
than half of the sessions ended up focusing on something OTHER than
governance.  People will talk about whatever they need to talk about.  The
sponsors took this quite well because they realized that they had just
received some very useful information.  And once more we were reminded of
the brilliance of being prepared to be surprised!

Hope this helps.

Christine
 
Christine Whitney Sanchez
KAIROS Alliance Inc.
2717 E. Mountain Sky Avenue
Phoenix, AZ  85048
480.759.0262
www.kairosalliance.com <http://www.kairosalliance.com> 

-----Original Message-----
From: OSLIST [mailto:OSLIST at LISTSERV.BOISESTATE.EDU] On Behalf Of Brendan
Mckeague
Sent: Tuesday, April 18, 2006 6:25 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 

*
*
==========================================================
OSLIST at LISTSERV.BOISESTATE.EDU
------------------------------
To subscribe, unsubscribe, change your options, view the archives of
oslist at listserv.boisestate.edu:
http://listserv.boisestate.edu/archives/oslist.html

To learn about OpenSpaceEmailLists and OSLIST FAQs:
http://www.openspaceworld.org/oslist

*
*
==========================================================
OSLIST at LISTSERV.BOISESTATE.EDU
------------------------------
To subscribe, unsubscribe, change your options,
view the archives of oslist at listserv.boisestate.edu:
http://listserv.boisestate.edu/archives/oslist.html

To learn about OpenSpaceEmailLists and OSLIST FAQs:
http://www.openspaceworld.org/oslist



More information about the OSList mailing list