AW: Bad experiences - was Proximity and Open Space after presentations

Fri Nov 24 11:06:00 PST 2006

Dear Eva, many thanks for your story! Very helpful. 

I insist on serious preparation meetings now, and in the meantime even that
the sponsor or money-responsible person is part of it. It happened to me
once that the president of an association stopped a scheduled OS shortly
before it was about to happen because she wanted more participants and saw
possibilities to recruit them if there was more time. Now I am curious (and
do hope) if and that there will be more participants.

I will develop a system to ask somebody in the organization after 6 months
what has happened with the OS-material and if I could be of further help.
This will generate valuable learning for all of us, and perhaps another Open
Space.

Kind regards from still very warm Switzerland - Catherine

Catherine Pfaehler Senn

Open Space Begleitung & Coaching

Kellersriedweg 8

CH - 2503 Biel

+41-(0)32 - 365 68 41

c.pfaehler at bluewin.ch

  _____  

Von: Eva P Svensson [mailto:eva at epshumaninvest.se] 
Gesendet: Freitag, 17. November 2006 19:52
An: c.pfaehler at bluewin.ch; OSLIST at LISTSERV.BOISESTATE.EDU
Betreff: SV: Bad experiences - was Proximity and Open Space after
presentations

Catherine asked;

Do any of you have experiences which didn’t turn out to be safe – and what
happened next in the organization? Do you follow up and ask what happened in
your client’s organization, e.g. half a year later?

I hear some people saying they had one experience in Open Space which wasn’t
well embedded in the organization and then got frustrated and decided they
would never go for it again. This of course is the worst case and bad
publicity for our passion, Open Space

Please share your bad experiences, we can all learn tremendously from them.

I am late in on this tread – way behind reading e-mails but here is what I
could share , if I hadn’t done it before and if so – here it is again

It was in a public organisation here in Sweden and I and a colleague who
worked with “meeting efficiency” was appointed to work with this
organisations meeting efficiency.. The organisation has offices on different
places and they where not happy with how their meetings used to be
conducted. 

And not to make the story to long -  I will go right to my analysis’ of what
and why it went wrong. Of course the Open Space meeting was not wrong –
everything went well :-) 

The “trouble” begins afterwards when it comes to action and working with the
high prioritized topics. Then it came up that there was “a deed mouse” ~ an
employee problem that no one had touched for years. This woman was not
participating in the meeting for some reason that I don’t know of. So when
it came to make the action that they had decided to work on – if I remember
right it was about “climate” and trust in the groups, the leadership team
was not willing to go forward. – This was clear in the follow up meeting I
had with them after the OS meeting. They had also felt alone – “that it was
all on their shoulders” to do, (and of course they had not gone to action
planning – they did not wanted that) so yes – it was in the leader teams
knee..

So they shut down the process, which was schedule to a series of OST
meetings.  In my eyes this was lack of leadership – to much fear to go into
the real problem and a very hierarchical organisation. We tried to follow up
and report our view with the head of the HR department but he was not
willing to hear what we thought and had seen. So they put the lid upon the
top of every thing and shut the space down. 

So – what I did wrong -->I took the theme we had talked about before for
granted and did not do a proper preparation meeting. I have always before –
and certainly after :-) done a proper preparation meeting, and if I had done
that – for example the story line I think there had been a better chance
that that problem had come up. And the manager “that had the problem” in his
department couldn’t make it to the preparation meeting. So that is another
part of it.

My lesson --> always does a proper preparation meeting, I would never again
say yes to have an OST meeting without that. 

So I guess this will counts as a “failure but, then – who am I to decide
what is failure – it sure was a failure for me, my reputation and Open
Space, but I don’t know if it was a failure for the people who really liked
the process

All the best from west coast of Sweden

:o)

Eva

Bästa hälsningar

Eva P Svensson

EPS Human Invest AB

"Verksamhetsutveckling genom människor skapar långsiktigt välmående företag
och organisationer!"

Anåsbergsvägen 22, 439 34  ONSALA

Tfn: 0300-615 05, Mobil: 0706-89 85 50

 <mailto:eva at epshumaninvest.se> eva at epshumaninvest.se,
<http://www.epshumaninvest.se> www.epshumaninvest.se

  _____  

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 *
* ==========================================================
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
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.openspacetech.org/pipermail/oslist-openspacetech.org/attachments/20061124/e6c9d082/attachment-0008.htm>