Moscow Mentoring Circle April 29th

[Raffi Aftandelian]

Dear colleagues,

I wanted to share a short report of the latest meeting of the Moscow
Mentoring Circle (MMC), which in its current (and first) incarnation is
devoted to experience sharing around OST/life practice of os and other
methods consonant with OST.

All together 8 or so people participated, including several corporate
trainers, a training manager from a major Russian company, a Chechen
cultural activist, and two children.

I rather enjoyed having a four and five year old child there. It
stretched the comfort zone for some when one of them ran off with the
speaking object in the closing circle when we were reflecting on
community archetype.

As the only facilitator there with formal OST facilitation experience
I chose not to experiment with facilitating and participating at the
same time. After we closed we went on for coffee elsewhere and
continued the conversation:

Some of the topics discussed were:
- "sellability" of OST
- what you need to do to sell OS
- pre and post-work with an OST meeting
- use of OST for strategic planning of a new NGO, Goryanka ("Woman of
the Mountains) (Roshni-Chu village, Urus Martan District, Chechnya), dedicated to offering folk music
and dance classes to talented children as a form of personal
rehabilitation.

The training manager present who'd had an experience of an enjoyable
multi-day OST in the nonprofit sector had a very clear intuitive sense of the
value of OST and that the post-OST-meeting work (like the pre-work)
was much more important and more key than the meeting itself.

I find holding the MMC rather satisfying. And it has taken me to a
deeper conversation with myself around what does the OST/os
community/organization of practice want to become? Who can we learn
from in doing what we do as a community/organization better? Who are
our models? I look forward to reading and studying Anne Stadler's
distillation of the Spirited Work community and seeing what from that
we can take here.

I see the air here is changing. On one level OST may indeed explode in
the corporate world here in Moscow and other parts of Russia. Things
have a funny way of taking off here very quickly. Galina Tsarkova
speaks of the "granularity" of OST. I sense that springtime
granularity right now.

Frankly, talking about os as a life practice is new for me and I
haven't have seen or heard much of such conversations yet. But, there
is a right time for everything.

Aside to Mark (Jones), I really enjoyed seeing your distillation on
the innovative organizations thread. Looking forward to having it
translated into Russian for a future "News from OS" issue. I hope
that's ok!

In the meantime, you can enjoy the pictures from MMC.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/81882819@N00/138177994/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/81882819@N00/138177965/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/81882819@N00/138177904/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/81882819@N00/138177877/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/81882819@N00/138177861/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/81882819@N00/138177781/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/81882819@N00/138177756/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/81882819@N00/138177735/

Best,
Raffi

---------------------------------------
Raffi Aftandelian
consultant trainer facilitator
essenceworks consulting group
organizational health and balance
Moscow
raffi at essenceworks.ru, raffi at bk.ru
+7 926 377 79 15

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