On "Failure" / Invitations
Harrison Owen
hhowen at verizon.net
Fri Jun 4 06:38:24 PDT 2010
One of the themes that seems to be surfacing here is the whole subject of
Invitations. The Invitation (theme) is definitely important as it sets the
raison d’être and frame for the gathering. I know that some people spend
terrific amounts of time and effort crafting that invitation – but my
experience has taken me in a different direction. In fact I have found that
the effectiveness of the Invitation is (oddly) inversely proportional to
time/effort expended. The key, I think is the necessity for a “real business
issue” as a first condition for a functional Open Space. And a real business
issue (no matter how you define business) is something that hits you right
in the face. You don’t have to think about it very much, and in fact it is
pretty hard to think about anything else. It is also usually true that the
folks in the organization (those who might care) have already named it. That
name might be something less than elegant and seemingly lacking in precision
as an outsider might see it – but for those in the know, the people who care
(exactly the right people for the Open Space) – they will instantaneously
recognize “it.” Some years ago I received a call about doing an Open Space.
After some initial, rather generalized conversation, the person on the other
end of the line said in some deep pain, “Our system is broke in just about
every way a system can be broken and everybody knows it.” As it happened
that system (business) resided in the state of Arizona – and there was the
theme and invitation. “Fixing Arizona: Issues and Opportunities.” There was
no reason to give all the details, motivational encouragement, pleas for
attendance. Everybody who cared already knew.
Actually when you think about it, it is probably true that if you have to
spend a lot of effort developing and clarifying the focal issue the chances
are you don’t have a “real business issue.” That being the case, doing an
Open Space may not be the appropriate way to go. Without the passion, focus,
and caring not too much is likely to happen. I guess that is not too
surprising as without passion, focus, and caring not too much happens in any
other part of life either.
Harrison
Harrison Owen
7808 River Falls Dr.
Potomac, MD 20854
USA
Phone 301-365-2093
www.openspaceworld.com
www.ho-image.com (Personal Website)
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From: OSLIST [mailto:OSLIST at LISTSERV.BOISESTATE.EDU] On Behalf Of Michael
Herman
Sent: Thursday, June 03, 2010 5:50 PM
To: OSLIST at LISTSERV.BOISESTATE.EDU
Subject: Re: On "Failure"
there are some situations that come to mind, harrison, but is sort of
reminds me of that time when louise mitran brought all the drumming gear to
one our trainings at the carleton. she took a group out in one session and
challenged them to play chaos. they really had a heck of time doing it,
sustaining it. for sure there were moments of discord and a lot of
messiness, but the driving force underneath it all was the inclination, some
sort collectively mutual invitation, to entrain with each other... and turn
it into music. so i was thinking not so much about any 'grand failures' but
more those moments of confusion, facilitator choice points, apparent chaos,
but pretty much i they always seem to resolve again. moral of the story
might be, when you find yourself under water, go with the flow, stay in
relationship, let the river take you where it's choosing, try not to get
stuck and hold your breath... you'll likely have another chance for opening
and fresh air, soon enough, even if not exactly soon as you want or expect.
that said, here are some of the situations that came to mind...
a buddy of mine called in sick the day before an event, so i walked in to
open space with no experience with the group. the managers had written the
invitation, and invited 100 folks to come work on the issues that made their
stomachs churn, hands sweat, or kept them up at night worrying. the were
working from a language they'd developed around "adaptive challenges" based
on a book they'd read together. when the issues all went up, the managers,
who had their own list of issues, looked at the wall, they were astounded to
see that the group had covered all of the mgrs issues. mission
accomplished, or so it would seem. next day, however, morning news sort of
blew up because all the lower level folks were feeling a bit disheartened,
thought they'd failed miserably, because they hadn't found a single issue
that really scared them. turns out what was freaking the mgrs out was just
the everyday challenge to folks down the hierarchy. the disheartening got
turned more confusing when some of the younger managers, who were very hot
for this new language they'd come up with from this book, tried hard to
impose a "training" in the right way to talk about these things. made for a
long morning news and then required the miracle of "the group catching up"
to the schedule... but none of that is particularly remarkable. in the end,
all the issues that mattered got discussed, documented, and they made a good
run at tackling the various things that were identified for doing
post-meeting.
so is this even a failure? could it have been if i'd made some different
choicse along the way? maybe, maybe not. depends on the definitions, i
think. certainly it was a deviation from the story told in the user's
guide. but we recovered. and i think that's what happens in every, or
almost every, case.
some of the recoveries happen before the event. the client dodges the real
issue and writes an invitation that says "come to an open space meeting."
well, that's not much of a theme, unless it's an osonos. so we fix that, go
deeper, dare to invite the real thing and get on with it.
then they want to have three short keynoters to open. well maybe we talk
them out of that, maybe we don't. once we had two of three keynoters
cancel. so one guy talked for 20 mins instead of his allotted 10. circle
was 200, statewide group, very diverse, never worked together. big issue.
but this guy was more readily associated and more active in one side of the
story. it set up a sort of competition because some felt heard and
addressed in teh opening, but others thought they'd been put in second
place. i motioned to the sponsor to pull the plug. he went out and put an
arm around the guy, thanked him and said "let's get started". i walked in,
past the podium he'd been standing at. with one hand, i tipped it over,
laid it down. by the time i got back around to that point of th circle,
interns had carried it off. but the damage was done. later that morning,
one of two key sponsors comes to me and says "fix it. my people are
pissed." she happens to be the one who's got to sign my check. i tell her
honestly, "now can do. it's in their hands now." on the second day, it
started to be dealt iwth directly, our friend ted ernst raised an issue that
began to put the two 'sides' together. we came up with tons of good stuff,
over 2.5 days, but i think it took another couple of annual repetitions of
this first event before everybody really felt like they were on the same
side. didn't help, probably, that one sponsor was a foundation, funding
some and not others. but that's the messiness we work in. i'm not sure
that co-sponsor's view of the thing ever improved, though she did take a
lead role in convening after-event meetings. a city-wide coalition came out
of those meetings and is now active and very successful 9 years later.
then there is the client who -- after sprinkling a day of open space
sessions into a week of meetings, 150 top people from around the world,
fortune 150 company, all the c-folks there -- came to me, as the proceedings
were just finished being printed, and said "the ceo says we can't distribute
these. there's no time. he hasn't read them. etc." i pushed hard for a
conversation with the ceo and got a very few minutes, in which i was able to
convince notice that he was trying to stop them from giving out notes about
waht everyone in the room was already thinking and speaking about. he
agreed that it was more dangerous to get in the way of it than to just let
it go. but he scuttled the session, can't recall the exact form, of the
prioritizing or conversing or voting or something that was to be done with
the rpoceedings. actually, i seem to remember people have to go through and
tear out the ballot pages from the books. luckily spiral bound, so the page
was never missed.
and then there is the client that thinks that all they need to do is call
the meeting to order, the facilitator will take it from there, and they're
off the hook forever. you think you've got them lined up, they get it,
they're on for it.. but deep down they want out. this is the sponsor who
might let slip in the opening intro "well, glad you all could get here. we
have no idea what's going to happen. that's michael's problem now...".
oops. checked out. and when the notes were all assembled, the client i'm
thinking of mysteriously managed to avoid sending them out for several
weeks. mostly the high-end consultants in this company, who'd travelled
from everywhere to london for this meeting think this meeting failed. no
follow-through. but... eventually one person, brand new in the office and
company, stepped up, got the notes from the leader, sorted things out and
sent them around to everyone. the conversation never recovered, but four
years later, it seems that that moment of leadership on the part of the new
person set her up to take on a leadership role in rebuilding their entire
technology platform. again, failure depends on definition and time frame.
but mostly i don't think of open spaces that failed, as much as some were
more fruitful than others, apparently, and moments when it was possible to
take the easy way out, letting that ceo do what he wanted without challenge,
instead of hanging in, and hanging with, no matter what, again, apparently,
happens to me personally.
m
--
Michael Herman
Michael Herman Associates
http://www.michaelherman.com
http://www.ronanparktrail.com
http://www.chicagoconservationcorps.org
http://www.openspaceworld.org
312-280-7838 (mobile)
On Thu, Jun 3, 2010 at 3:23 PM, Harrison Owen <hhowen at verizon.net> wrote:
Michael – it would be really interesting to hear some actual situations
where what you are describing is true. I’ve never seen it, but I did hear of
one. It happened in South Africa where a local consultant took Open Space as
a license for absence. He literally left for most of the day. As it turned
out (as I heard from one of the participants) the group really didn’t miss
him, and was basically sorry to see him return. And that same participant
was sure that there had to be something more than he had seen. As a
consequence he came to a “training program” (back in the days when I used to
do something like that J) and subsequently opened space all over the place.
So I guess there was a happy ending after a rocky start. Or something.
But you really put your finger on something – “active listening” – which is
not so much about doing anything but rather Being intensely. Definitely
hard to describe but my best shot is the enigmatic phrase – Being totally
present and absolutely invisible. In my experience this is a matter of
intention and practice. And the best part is that it is all definitely
rewarding, not only in terms of facilitating Open Space, but equally in
terms of self understanding and personal presence. It feels good.
Harrison
Harrison Owen
7808 River Falls Dr.
Potomac, MD 20854
USA
Phone 301-365-2093
www.openspaceworld.com
www.ho-image.com (Personal Website)
To subscribe, unsubscribe, change your options, view the archives of
oslist at listserv.boisestate.edu:
http://listserv.boisestate.edu/archives/oslist.html
From: OSLIST [mailto:OSLIST at LISTSERV.BOISESTATE.EDU] On Behalf Of Michael
Herman
Sent: Thursday, June 03, 2010 2:41 PM
To: OSLIST at LISTSERV.BOISESTATE.EDU
Subject: Re: On "Failure"
i have a teacher who likes to put little reminders on pencils and pass them
around. one of my favorite pencils says: "really easy is often quite
difficult."
i think this is true of open space. i've seen a number of situations where
the facilitator or the process itself was assumed to be a bit of magic, so
nobody needed to do much else to make it happen. this makes all kinds of
large and small "failures" possible -- all owing to some lapses in the
quality of attention, awareness, relationship.
somebody once told me that carl rogers (some sort of psychologist, i think)
used to listen so intently that he would often break out in a sweat -- just
listening to someone. sometimes i think open space takes this sort of
quality or intensity of attention... or maybe of awareness. that the heart
is this active, even if the body is apparently doing nothing. like when so
many muscles are engaged in walking a balance beam, or timing a jump.
actively pulsing, checking, on and off, holding and releasing, inviting and
reporting.
i'd guess a fair number of "failures" have their roots in forgetting that os
is this sort of active practice, even if a lot of the action is not
outwardly visible or dramatic or difficult. weirdenss seems to flow from
gaps in clarity, in attention, in awareness, in relationship. not so much,
i think, from gaps in actual outer logistics.
m
--
Michael Herman
Michael Herman Associates
http://www.michaelherman.com
http://www.ronanparktrail.com
http://www.chicagoconservationcorps.org
http://www.openspaceworld.org
312-280-7838 (mobile)
On Thu, Jun 3, 2010 at 12:07 PM, VISUELLE PROTOKOLLE
<mail at visuelle-protokolle.de> wrote:
Harrison and all,
Another example of an OS that went terribly wrong:
It was a factory producing printing machines, both in Eastern and western
Germany, and the participants were mixed from both areas. We had the o.k.
from the four directors, to whom we had illustrated what to expect, and a
final conference after the OS was already determined. One of the directors,
the one who seemed to be the most employee-oriented, was choosen to say some
words at the end of the OS. Our partner in the company was a young man from
HR, very active, with good contacts to the directors. So he insisted that he
should brief the director what to say at the end of OS.
Everything went fine. The groups worked with joy and enthusiasm. We
accompanied the whole OS with 3 people visualizing everything, and that was
a big success, because everybody could see what had happened everywhere.
After we had shown the pictures in a final slideshow, the director stood up
and destroyed everything within 5 minutes. He said that he was disappointed,
had expected other outcomes, and that the managers wood have a hard time to
use some of the results.
That was the end of the project for us, but much worse all the participants
were angry and a big chance was lost for the company.
Of course the mistake was to let the young HR-man brief the director.
Reinhard
Reinhard Kuchenmüller
Dr. Marianne Stifel
VISUELLE PROTOKOLLE
Kuchenmüller & Stifel
+39-0566-88 929
www.visuelle-protokolle.de
Am 03/06/10 18:12 schrieb "Ralph Copleman" unter <rcopleman at comcast.net>:
Harrison and all,
I've had a few that sort of fell flat.
One involved a group concerned about availability of services for senior
citizens across an entire US state. Two-thirds of the room consisted of
seniors themselves and, frankly, a lot of them ran out of energy about an
hour after lunch. So they sat around, a number slumping in chairs with eyes
closed.
Another involved an exploration of customer service issues for an airline.
Lots of corporate leaders from the airline present, along with their booking
agents (this pre-dates internet booking sites), frequent flyer customers,
and corporate travel execs who make travel policy for their companies. A
great mix, actually. We were set to go from 8:00 a.m to 4:00. About 2:00,
a group of participants more or less seized control of the meeting somehow
(I wasn't in the room when it occurred) and got everyone to agree to shorten
the meeting by a full hour. When I returned at 3:00, someone simply
informed me, and asked that I begin the closing circle. So that's what I
did. I never found out what actually happened.
Not sure how to think about that last one, since I never found out how it
all developed, but the following one is more like a true failure.
I was asked to convene a two-day open space gathering for about 200 folks
from around the US. It would be the annual meeting of an association of a
certain type of public health officer (cannot recall the details). The
whole thing was pretty dead from the outset –– I mean 200 people posting a
total of only 15 sessions for two whole days!? I found out the theme was
all wrong. The planning committee chose an idea that turned out to have no
juice for the association's members. I had spent hours in conference calls
with the leadership group and the planning committee, and they'd assured me
that the idea they chose was at the heart of the challenges facing them and
their organizations. Turns out that was dead wrong. Nobody else cared. I
don't know how I might have seen through this situation ahead of time.
I essentially agree with you, H. If the conditions are appropriate, it will
work. But, if the three experiences above teach me anything, it's clear
that stuff can always happens.
Ralph Copleman
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