needing some advice

[Wendy Farmer-O'Neil]

Hi Jon,

One rationale for keeping the ownership within the agencies flows directly
from the law of two feet--for any collaboration effort to succeed there
needs to be both passion and responsibility.  If control is centralized and
pulled away from the projects themselves, you essentially cut off the foot
of responsibility.  Passion will fizzle without real responsibility (or
agency or ownership).  There needs to be an embedded ownership within these
initiatives (genuine/authentic responsibility) or you will seriously
truncate and limit their chances of success.  Which is probably why your OD
sense is tingling.  And, as they have hired you to coordinate such
collaborative efforts, you also limit your ability to identify the change
leaders and emergent leadership within each agency by centralizing control.


Don't know if you can communicate this perspective to these folks, but the
best role for the level of support and drive they can bring to these
projects is to protect and hold the space for new and emergent structures to
arise.  

One of the big challenges in bringing open space practice more consciously
to large agencies is supporting existing leadership to understand a new way
of leading.  There is often a genuine and understandable human fear
operating behind it of loss of relevance (often manifests as controlling
behaviour). You will need to help these folks envision and grow into a new
sense of their own leadership and of what leadership that supports deep
collaboration looks like.

Ground your presentation in what you know about Open Space practice and how
and why it works, translating the essence and form of it into the language
and structures of your organization. Transmitting deep respect for their
current roles and helping them to collectively write the story of their own
emerging roles may help to channel their passion into a productive direction
for your initiatives.  Always remembering that conflict is just passion: can
you place a little pebble in that flow that will redirect its course into a
supportive pattern? In other words, don't stand in the way of it and take
the brunt, blend and flow: look for the path of confluence. 

(If you have facilitation of the meeting, you could start with an
appreciative question around their best experience of collaboration and what
supported that--then harvest the learnings and together look at how that
applies to your current situation.)

Best of luck,
Wendy


-----Original Message-----
From: OSLIST [mailto:OSLIST at LISTSERV.BOISESTATE.EDU] On Behalf Of Jon Harvey
Sent: Friday, July 27, 2007 3:44 PM
To: OSLIST at LISTSERV.BOISESTATE.EDU
Subject: needing some advice
 

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