[OSList] Rescue a project in crisis with OST

Tue Mar 6 09:38:32 PST 2012

Oh Peggy - Those were the days. And thanks to you and Harold for putting the
video on Vimeo. Sort of ruins sales, but very handy to  have. And for
anybody who has not seen it, definitely worth a look - and if you keep a
copy of Peggy's most excellent summary of what happened and show both to
anybody interested in Open Space in a "real live, intense, conflicted,
business situation" - I think you will have a winner.

Harrison

PS - My starring role has nothing to do with my endorsement. Of course.

Harrison Owen

7808 River Falls Dr.

Potomac, MD 20854

USA

189 Beaucaire Ave. (summer)

Camden, Maine 20854

Phone 301-365-2093

(summer)  207-763-3261

www.openspaceworld.com

www.ho-image.com (Personal Website)

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From: oslist-bounces at lists.openspacetech.org
[mailto:oslist-bounces at lists.openspacetech.org] On Behalf Of Peggy Holman
Sent: Tuesday, March 06, 2012 12:15 PM
To: World wide Open Space Technology email list
Subject: Re: [OSList] Rescue a project in crisis with OST

How about another telecommunications company story?  It was my first real
experience of Open Space.  The company was US WEST and the year was 1995.
There had been floods in Arizona and serious outages.  It was also a time of
transition to high bandwidth technologies so little investment in the old
copper phone lines had been made.  The system was in bad shape as a result.
And to complicate matters further, union contracts were being negotiated
behind the scenes.  

A union rep, Bill Mahoney, who also worked with Open Space, convinced the
head of the state organization to try Open Space.  I was part of a corporate
group and got involved.  We contacted Harrison and ran a 2.5 day Open Space
called "Discovering Priorities".  It was a wild event!  The majority of the
participants were network technicians -- the people who climb telephone
poles.  (When they were made of wood and people still climbed them.)  They
had a colorful vocabulary, with more 4 letter words (curse words) than I'd
ever heard before!

The outcome: people not only worked out how to deal with the aging
technology and get back to reliable service (a high value for the company
and among the many veteran employees), but long-time broken relationships
between groups were mended.  My favorite example:

People from two departments who were always fighting met with each other.
They discovered that their performance goals were written in a way that by
definition put them in conflict.  They worked out a manager swap, where
they'd have first-line supervisors trade jobs to learn about each other's
businesses.  And of course, renegotiate goals that supported the success of
both groups.

Another favorite moment: about a week after the Open Space, a meeting about
next steps occurred.  Rather than just managers, it was opened to anyone who
wanted to participate.  A number of the union people -- network technicians
-- were there.  One of them said, "let's hire contract workers (non-union
labor) to handle the daily stuff while we rehabilitate the basic plant."
This would have gotten him shot before the Open Space!  What had happened
during the OS was people had a chance to learn more about how everything
worked so rather than making decisions from a narrow perspective, this
suggestion was based in having an understanding of the whole system.

This is the event where I fell in love with Open Space because I saw the
needs of individuals and the whole both met.

And I'm happy to report that it is on video.  It's still my favorite video
about Open Space all these years later.  The Open Space Institute US,
through Harold Shinsato, put it on Vimeo about 8 months ago:

http://vimeo.com/25251316

Peggy

_________________________________

Peggy Holman

peggy at peggyholman.com

15347 SE 49th Place

Bellevue, WA  98006

425-746-6274

www.peggyholman.com

www.journalismthatmatters.org

Enjoy the award winning Engaging Emergence: Turning Upheaval
<http://peggyholman.com/papers/engaging-emergence/>  into Opportunity

"An angel told me that the only way to step into the fire and not get burnt,
is to become 
the fire".
  -- Drew Dellinger

On Mar 6, 2012, at 7:32 AM, Harrison Owen wrote:

Rescue? Ah yes! My favorite on one occurred almost 20 years ago. The
Venezuelan Cell phone company - TELCEL - was just launched and they were
about to fail. The problem  was that the business was much, much, too good.
In a word the company had massively underestimated the public demand for
cell phones. In fact TELCEL had sold more phones in the first 6 months of
operation than they expected to sell in the first several years. With demand
like that the system was in massive overload. It wasn't just the individual
phones, but all the infrastructure - towers, switchers, and all the rest.
They were about ready to go down the tubes. My client owned the company and
knew about Open Space because we had used it many times before with his
other businesses - but this was a big one.

When a company gets into trouble like this, one of the first things to go is
the ability (time) to communicate with all parties. So busy there was no
time to talk. So -- a bad situation was getting progressively worse.

We did an Open Space for everybody (350 people, I recall). Essentially shut
down the company, save for a skeleton crew. We only had a day, but that was
all they needed because the folks were energetic, bright, and very
motivated. By the end of the day, channels of communication were open again,
plans were made, problems identified and on the way to solution. The biggest
learning, I think, was articulated by one person who said - "We didn't just
do an Open Space - we live in Open Space. This is our world!" One result was
that Open Space became the "go-to" approach whenever real difficulties or
opportunities presented.

Harrison

Harrison Owen

7808 River Falls Dr.

Potomac, MD 20854

USA

189 Beaucaire Ave. (summer)

Camden, Maine 20854

Phone 301-365-2093

(summer)  207-763-3261

www.openspaceworld.com

www.ho-image.com (Personal Website)

To subscribe, unsubscribe, change your options, view the archives of OSLIST
Go to:http://lists.openspacetech.org/listinfo.cgi/oslist-openspacetech.org

From: oslist-bounces at lists.openspacetech.org
[mailto:oslist-bounces at lists.openspacetech.org] On Behalf Of Csaba Lengyel
Sent: Monday, March 05, 2012 5:29 PM
To: oslist at lists.openspacetech.org
Subject: [OSList] Rescue a project in crisis with OST

Hi all,

I have had a discussion with the sponsor of a really troubled big IT
investment and business transformation project.

They have go-live date in 4 month and in reality the project is so much
behind schedule they have hardly any chance to meet the deadline.

There is a lot of conflict within the project, the task is almost
impossible, time is short - well I thought it's quite a typical situation
calling for OST.

I mentioned it and the guy has shown interest, however he's had too many bad
experience with miraculous techniques and solutions, he was a bit sceptical.
So he asked if OST has ever been used for project turnaround.

I'm sure the answer is yes (and I also know OST always works), but I have
only used OST for kicking-off projects and not for rescuing them.

So I decided to ask the community. Do you have any experience with OST in
rescuing projects? If yes, please help me sharing it!

BR,

Csaba Lengyel

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