[OSList] Dealing with conflicts

Craig Gilliam wcraiggilliam at hotmail.com
Wed Jul 25 04:48:52 PDT 2012


I do a great deal of conflict work professionally.  I am a practitioner of OS as well.  

Rather than hearing only success (and I know that the definition of success varies) stories of OS and conflict, I am also interested in those times
when someone felt OS did not work in a conflict situation, or did not work as well as he/she thought it would and what did you learn from those encounters. 

Thanks,

Craig


> Date: Wed, 25 Jul 2012 13:13:58 +0200
> From: mmpanne at boscop.org
> To: oslist at lists.openspacetech.org
> Subject: Re: [OSList] Dealing with conflicts
> 
> Dear Marie Ann,
> the gathering Harrison describes (Israelis and Palestinians in Rome) got 
> him to write a book on why os events are so peaceful even in highly 
> conflicting situations.
> If you like, I will send you a copy of "The Practice of Peace"... of 
> course, you can also get the german version I was involved in: "Raum für 
> den Frieden".
> In my own experience there have been a number of highly conflicting 
> situations for which sponsors chose Open Space Technology. The biggest 
> job I had was to convince the sponsors that you need nothing but open 
> space and it worked every time (Israelis and Palestinians meeting in 
> Switzerland, Parish Board and church workers at issue with each other, 
> Board of Directors and Marketing Department of a Food Corporation at 
> issue, Welfare Organisation with all subsystems at "war", Highschool 
> with opposing factions of teachers...you name it).
> Come to think of it, at the beginning of my OSpractice after 35 years of 
> OD consulting, I actually had to convince mainly myself that highly 
> conflicting situations is what os-events run on (one of the five 
> preconditions)... unlearning the old approaches (still very much in 
> vogue!!) was the hard part.
> Greetings from Berlin
> mmp
> 
> 
> 
> 
> On 24.07.2012 22:35, Marie Ann Östlund wrote:
> > Dear all,
> >
> > I just spent a week in a community in France that is divided by quite
> > a large conflict. Have anyone of you used OS with a group of people
> > where the conflict is at its hight and emotions are still strong? I
> > can see that OS can be used in complex conflictual situations, but
> > wonder whether you would first spend time bringing down their emotions
> > to a 'manageable' level before attempting to bring them together into
> > an OS.
> >
> > Do you have any experiences in this regard? I'd be very interested in
> > your reflections!
> >
> > Thank you,
> >
> > Marie Ann
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> 
> -- 
> Michael M Pannwitz, boscop eg
> Draisweg 1, 12209 Berlin, Germany
> ++49-30-772 8000
> mmpanne at boscop.org	www.boscop.org
> 
> 
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