I have used Open Space in almost every way conceivable and what Lisa Heft wrote on the OSLIST today about using it with traditional conferences strikes home. This is good wisdom, friends:
My experience is that – if doing a mix of ‘traditional’ format conference and Open Space – the most ideal situation is traditional, (recreation day before or after that or after the whole conference) and then Open Space.
I have seen that if Open Space happens first – when there is the switch to traditional, participants feel uncomfortable and ‘edgy’ because they have tasted the power of self-organization and physically being able to move to what they need and find who they need – so they are not happy or focused sitting in an audience listening after that. If you do OS as the last day (or whatever) then there are two extra values of people being able to host conversations about what they are learning and exploring in the previous days of the conference as well as whatever your theme question / task will be. Nice integration and self-organized continuation of learning, networking, community. Plus, the close of the Open Space makes a very nice close for the conference – it really feels like reflection, comment, participant voice to close.
The most difficult thing I know is to start and stop Open Space / break it up within a conference – really, it destroys the reason for doing OS and completely changes what OS can do. When I am told that by a conference I simply switch to some other lovely interactive dialogue stuff – for example I will do World Cafes within a conference with themes that will help participants as they move through the arc of learning and the several days of the conference.
The other most difficult thing I know is to have OS at the same time as other things in a conference – because usually there is not a good, focused opening (for all participants who wish to join), arc of learning and thinking across time, and not a good sense of closure. So it all feels like a big room where conversations can happen but just like any other sort of coffee house environment, no reason to do Open Space. You could just as well give people signs to put on their tables to gather around a self-organized topic whenever they come into that room, if they like. No process or facilitator needed. (this is sometimes referred to as ‘Birds of a Feather’.)
Oh yes and I personally think that all formalities in a conference must be seriously considered – do 100% of the participants need to do that voting or decision, or is that for a small leadership group, do people really need a keynote speaker or is the wisdom in the group, are speeches really good for anyone other than the person speaking ;o) … do people walk away from conferences going ‘gee I loved that formal gala and it really changed how I do my work on Monday’ or do they get more from participant-driven co-learning – all things to consider when deciding on overall conference design
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One of the great pleasures of the weekend I just spent in San Francisco at the Applied Improv Network conference was hanging out with good friends, Caitlin Frost, Amanda Fenton (who is blogging up a storm these days), Viv McWaters and the inimitable Nancy White. While we were eating lunch one day, Nancy interviewed me on the subject of group sizes for a class she is teaching. Here is my off the cuff response:
If you want to see more thoughts on group sizes, I wrote a post on this a while back. See this as an invitation to practice and notice. No science was involved in the creation of these ideas!
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Just read an article on how the fear of failure is the greatest thing holding back innovation in the business world. One reads these kinds of articles all the time. The essence is that unless we can let go of fear or deal with our deep need to be in control at all times, innovation is stifled.
This is true of course, but I see few articles that talk about how fear of failure in built into the architecture of the organization.
We live in an expert driven culture. Kids raised in schools are taught at an early age that having the answer is everything. Children raise their hands and are given points for the correct answer. Marks and scores are awarded for success – failure gets you remedial help, often crushing dreams and passions at the same time.
In the post-school world, most people are hired in a job interview based on the answers they give. There are millions of words written on how to give a stellar job interview, to land the job of your dreams. It is has to do with giving the right answers.
And so it is no surprise in the organizational world that I see success as the the only way forward and failure as “not an option.” For leaders, embracing failure is almost too risky. Despite the management literature to the contrary, I see very few leaders willing to take the risk that something may fail. Sometimes the failure is wrapped in competence – it’s okay to fail, but not to have losses. In other words, don’t do something I can’t repair.
This is because few of these articles talk about some of the real politiks of organizational life. It’s not that I’m afraid to fail – it’s that I am afraid to lose my job. When there is a scarcity of political capital and credit in an organization, there are multiple games that are played to turn failure into a way to screw the other guy so I don’t lose my job. Blame is deflected, responsibility is assigned elsewhere, and sometimes people will take credit for taking the risk but will lie the failure at the feet of someone else. It’s relatively easy to play on the expert driven culture to advance your own causes at the expense of another’s failings.
The answer to this is for leaders to be engaged in changing the architecture of fear and failure in the organization. It means hiring people into their areas of stretch, not into their areas of core competence. It means embodying risk taking, and creating and maintaining a culture of risk and trust. A single betrayal destroys the fabric of a risk taking team.
I think that means going beyond simply having corporate pep rallies to celebrate failure, or giving incentives for the “best failed idea.” It goes to creating a culture of conversation and collective ownership for successes and failures. It means standing with each other and not advancing your own interests at the expense of something that was tried. It means deeply investigating on an ongoing basis the ways in which we hold each other accountable so that we may work with grace and support, to rush in to help when things go sideways instead of lobbing accusations from the sidelines.
Without changing the architecture of fear, embracing the fear of failure is impossible.
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I was listening to a brilliant interview with the theologian and scholar Walter Bruggeman this morning. He was talking about “the prophetic imagination” and using the poetry of the Old Testament prophets to make a point about a key capacity that is missing in the world right now: the ability to deal with disruption.
SImply, disruption is what happens when the plans we thought we had have suddenly changed. It could be a major economic collapse – a black swan event – or something so small as your bus left early. How we respond to disruption is a key capacity for individual resourcefulness, and how we collectively deal with disruption is a key capacity for resilience.
It is interesting, as Bruggeman notes, that our frame for understanding the future is basically consumerist. We purchase certainty. It’s as if we invest in the present because it guarantees a given performance of the future. When we buy something, we expect to receive quality and a guarantee that if it doesn’t work according to plan, we can hold someone else responsible.
That understanding about the way the future is supposed to roll out infects everything we do. When events overtake our assumptions about the future, we look for someone to blame, someone to be accountable, someone to make it right. I can find all kinds of ways in which I expect people to OWE me something. It’s as if our participation in the social contract guarantees that our expectations will be met.
But they never are. We cannot all live in our ideal worlds. Diversity and complexity means disruption.
The greatest challenge of our time I think, both individually and collectively, is how to equip ourselves for disruption. There are many patterns that scale across dimensions of practice, and a few key ones may be:
- Self-awareness. Knowing your own response to disruption is helpful. Do you get stressed by unexpected change? Do you take it in stride? Does your community shake and shudder with fits and paroxysms or do you just give up? All of these reactions are common and they are interesting. And they are not anyone’s fault or anyone else’s responsibility but your own. Learning to be resourceful with disruption begins by knowing how you deal with it.
- Stop. When events overtake you it is wise to stop. The worst thing to do is to continue to pursue the course of action you initiated before the disruption occurred. As an individual, stopping is easier than doing it as a collective. It often takes a loud voice to get a group intent on achievement to stop what it is doing, so being prepared to stop means paying attention to the small voices – the ones inside yourself and the ones inside your team.
- Look for surprise. One of the basic operating principles of Open Space Technology is “Be Prepared to Be Surprised.” My friend Brian Bainbridge lived this principle, even from within the relative security and certainty of his life as a Catholic priest. As a result he welcomed surprise with delight. Looking for and preparing for surprises isn’t just a good self-help trick though. It’s excellent planning. And because by definition, you can never know what will surprise you, the best way to prepare for surprise is to train your outlook to work with it rather than against it. Lots of energy is spent beating back the results of surprise. We would do better to be able to see it’s utility and work with it.
- Welcome and engage the stranger. There is a Rumi poem called “The Guest House” I love that has these lines in it: “This being human is a guest house. Every morning a new arrival”Welcome and entertain them all! Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows who sweep your house empty of its furniture, still, treat each guest honourably. He may be clearing you out for some new delight.” the stranger contains the answer. When disruption occurs, it is like a door opening through which floods unfamiliarity. That all comes with strangers and many of those strangers hold the answers to what to do next, but you have to take the time to engage with them. And never discount the stranger among you, the person you thought you knew that suddenly becomes a different in the midst of a crises.
- Choose wisely. Meeting the chaos of disruption with the order of stillness helps to create the space for wisdom. Not having stillness means one gets caught up in the rush and tumble of chaotic disruption and one reacts instead of acting wisely. Becoming still and then stopping has similar results. Balancing chaos and order gives us the time and space to make a wise decision. The opinions of others help here. If you are alone when your life is disrupted, you might not have the breadth of understanding to make a wise decision. You may end up travelling in a direction that takes you away from where you need to go. When you make a choice, choose wisely.
- Commit. Finally commit fully to your next move. This is principle that is alive in the field of improvisational theatre. The scene takes a surprising twist and as an actor you have two choices: hang on to the story you were previously developing or let the new story line change you. You can tell an improviser that only half commits to the new story. They become immediately stuck in a space that is too constrained to move. They are wanting to work with the new but unwilling to abandon the old. When disruption occurs it is already too late not to be changed by it. So commit fully to the new world so that you can be a full participant in it.
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“Conversation demands equality between participants. Indeed, it is one of the most important ways of establishing equality. Its enemies are rhetoric, disputation, jargon and private languages, or despair at not being listened to and not being understood.”
– Theodore Zeldin
To sit in the presence of one another, to open to each others deepest longings, o host the space that makes room for silence and the most earnest murmurs of the heart. To see another as they see you, to pay respect to the story of a human being who sits with you and who is curious about your own.
All this is the greatest practice for restoring our humanity and our relations to one another. And this practice should not be deferred to some future time when the conditions are ripe. To sit in the present act of conversation is to be creating the preferred world now.