Tired of strategic planning? Yes, thank you for asking.

This piece points out that traditional strategic planning processes fail mostly becasue they lack all of the essential ingredients of Open Space technology meetings.

This long quote summaraizes the approach:

"Part of the answer lies in taking a fresh look at the substance of business unit and corporate strategy. But a more important—and often overlooked—element is to rethink the process by which strategy is made. It can even be argued that without a strong process, it is unlikely that the substance will come out right.

A key starting point is the acceptance of the counterintuitive notion that the strategic-planning process should not be designed to make strategy. Henry Mintzberg, a professor of management at McGill University, calls the phrase "strategic planning" an oxymoron.1 He argues that real strategies are rarely made in paneled conference rooms but are more likely to be cooked up informally and often in real time—in hallway conversations, casual working groups, or quiet moments of reflection on long airplane flights.

What then is the purpose, if any, of a formal planning process? Our research persuades us that the exercise can add value if it has two overarching goals. The first is to build "prepared minds"—that is, to make sure that decision makers have a solid understanding of the business, its strategy, and the assumptions behind that strategy, thereby making it possible for executives to respond swiftly to challenges and opportunities as they occur in real time. GE Capital, for instance, has consistently proved quicker to react and better able to value acquisition opportunities than have its competitors. Part of this success is due to a strategy process ensuring that GE Capital’s executives have a strong grasp of the strategic context they operate in before the unpredictable but inevitable twists and turns of their business push them to make M&A and other critical decisions in real time."

The article details a number of ways to plan for strategy along these lines, but doesn't mention OST, which could shave a lot of time and money off of the preparation process and put that energy into the real time strategic conversations.



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This piece entitled "Inside the (Twisted) Mind of the Average Consumer" examines behavioural economics, including recent research into how people set value to things.

It might sound dry in summary, but consider this quote:

"Pain that increases is considered worse than pain that is constant, even if that increasing pain is at a lower level than the constant pain."

There are a couple of implications for people who work in organizational development, including asking the question, how do we draw attention to constant pain?






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More form The Long Now Foundation website.

"This Shinto shrine at Ise named Jingu Shrine is rebuilt every twenty years. Its first incarnation was in 04 C.E. This type of design, which utilises ephemeral materials while capitalizing on the human element, is a great inspiration for The Long Now Foundation. This object has done something which Stonehenge and the Great Pyramids have not; it aided the survival of its institution."

More about the shrine...


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Talk about Expanding Our Now. Holy cow.


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Interesting article about revitalizing the down town core of Dallas Texas. The piece talks about what makes great American cities great, and the theses is summarized by this quote:

"Great cities work because they draw people who have their own purposes, find or create their own communities, and contribute to the urban fabric in unexpected ways. A great city doesn’t require a unifying common ground. It requires just the opposite: lots of centers, each with enough amenities to support its own little world.

There’s a phrase for a city with a unifying common ground: small town."

That is a nice observation about why Open Space is so important. It is the focus on small clatches of people and information that allow groups, organizations and communities to succeed rather than a an ostentatious display of unified grandeur. If we poured energy into living a mission rather than creating a mission statement, we would all be further ahead.



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Reflections on Stephen Wolfram's "A New Kind of Science" describes the recent book by Wolfram on cellular automata.

I love this quote: "Whenever a phenomenon is encountered that seems complex it is taken almost for granted that the phenomenon must be the result of some underlying mechanism that is itself complex. But my discovery that simple programs can produce great complexity makes it clear that this is not in fact correct."

The article is a very wide ranging discussion and critique of Wolfram's work.

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Summary of  Spiral Dynamics  by Don Beck and Christopher Cowan by Steve Dinan which has cross connections with the work of Ken Wilber, whose thinking has underpinned a great deal of work on OST and subsequent follow up, such as Michael Herman's work on organizational evolution.

Just another thread connecting a few dots...



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Pattern Language. I'm not sure what it is yet, but it seems interesting. My initial observation is that it documents the patterns we use to design and organize things. More to come as I explore.



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Cool thoughts on the web from Cluetrain Manifesto wise man David Weinberger. THis article from Fast Company contains some useful observations about the web that apply to Open Space in general.

Open Space Technology and the Web are friends, that is for sure. As more communities and organizations begin to realize the implications of existing in cyberspace, I think more and more, people relaize that process has to synchronize with the field upon which they play. OST and the Web were made for each other, and all over the place it is becoming clearer and clearer that the relationship will only get stronger.

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Years agao, around the time that I was quitting my last inside job, I read Magister Ludi, by Hermann Hesse. It chronicles the life of a game master in charge of the Glass Bead Game. Recently it came up on the OSLIST that the game master role was akin to the role of the Open Space facilitator: setting challenges and holding space for connections to be made.

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Swarming can be applied to music. And this leads me to wonder if there isn't a way of tracking the results of Open Space Technology meetings that play by the same rules: moving towards the centre, staying away from each other and going in the same direction....



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