I just opened space here for 550 people at the Food and Society Conference. This was the biggest OST gathering I have ever facilitated, and it’s huge in importance as well. There must have been close to 100 sessions proposed for today and I’m just gathering my energy for a long day and night ahead of compiling the proceedings document.
I’m a stranger to the good food movement in the United States, and so it’s hard for me to know what the agenda looks like, but like all Open Space events I trust that it is what is needed right now. Our organizing question was: “If you take the margins and social justice seriously, what are the bold conversations you need to have to amplify and accelerate the impact of good food.” I stepped into the circle following a powerful talk on structural racism in the food system given by today’s provocateur, Maya Wiley from the Center for Social Inclusion. She dropped a great challenge into the centre of the circle, speaking about the radical nature of this room full of people. People were ready to get to work. I have rarely seen a flood to the centre of the room as I just experienced. It’s kind of overwhelming.
So the participants are in a break now, and soon enough the remainder of the day will be self-organized. Learning a lot about working with great friends, all of whom had my back this morning and had the logistics nailed down pretty well. We had to prepare 140 breakout spaces, in a conference facility that is over the top luxurious and is pretty concerned about the aesthetics of randomly places pods of chairs. Within these constraints, the conference staff have been great and the hosting team rocks. It’s impossible to do one’s best work alone.
You can follow along with the gathering at the Food and Society website.
[tags]fas2008[/tags]
Taking a moment here in the newsroom to blog a little about the WK Kellogg Foundation Food and Society 2008 gathering here in Phoenix. It is halfway through day one of this two-plus day gathering to look at connecting and inspiring leadership in the good food movement across the USA.
For the past nine months my Art of Hosting colleagues Tim Merry, Toke Moeller, Tuesday Ryan-Hart, Monica Nissen and Phil Cass and I have been working with the Kellogg Foundation and their partner Winrock International to craft a conference that was fundamentally different from the previous eight conferences that have supported this movement. Last year, Tim was invited to attend Food and Society as a slam poet to help with the harvest at that gathering. As a result of him sitting in the design meetings and debriefs, he was able to show up more and more as the process consultant that he is most of the time. After inviting the possibility that the conference could shift to focus on relationships, Kellogg opened up and decided to try something different, to connect and inspire leadership instead of a traditional conference format of keynote speaker and break out session. That’s how we all got involved in the design and hosting of a gathering of 550 people looking at fundamentally changing the American food system.
This year we are tipping the conference design much more into a participatory and engaged gathering. We are in the middle of a Good Food Village Square, featuring 17 projects from around the United States who are sharing their leading edge questions, rather than slick presentations. They are inviting people to work with them to address issues like scaling good food distribution, working to alleviate the poverty embedded in the food production system, growing small operations larger while retaining core principles, and engaging community in the production, distribution and consumption of their own food for health, culture and prosperity.
Instead of keynote speakers, we have provocateurs, including Norma Flores, an incredible woman who works with the Association of Farmworker Opportunities Programs spoke this morning of her experiences growing up as a farmworker from a very young age. She spoke of the child labour practices, the health risks and the exploitation of farm workers to produce cheap food cheaply. We also had an incredible montage about migrant farmworkers from The Migrant Project to focus our thinking on the social justice imperative for this movement. Later on today we have a world cafe to sense what is cooking with good food.
Tomorrow we’re into Open Space for most of the day, looking at how to organize for action within the good food movement and see what good food can also do. 550 is the largest Open Space I have ever run, but despite the logistics being more complex, the feeling is the same. Working with good friends also makes a huge difference.
[tags] fas2008[/tags]
Jack Martin Leith on how to do rapid innovation using Open Space Technology:
We hear a lot of talk these days about Open Innovation (American academic Henry Chesbrough wrote the book), but not very much about Open Space Innovation. I’m not talking about new developments in the field of Open Space Technology – I’ll leave that for another day – but rather using Open Space Technology to accelerate the process of new product development and other forms of innovation.Jeffrey Hyman and I did just that for a global food manufacturer a few years ago, and it worked so well that we seriously considered forming a company to commercialise the process. Fate had other plans for us, and Jeffrey became the founder and chairman of the Food & Drink Innovation Network. Now that the statute of limitations is no longer in force, I am able to show you the mirrors, hidden levers and trapdoor so that you can work the magic for yourself.
What follows from there is a very cool post detailing the whole process. A must read.
Here is a great description of Open Space as used at the Agile Open Northwest Conference.
This is a simple, inviting description of the process. Well done ANW folks!
Back in June of last year I facilitated a one day Open Space event for a group in Vancouver called the United Community Services Coop. The event was called “Leading Change” and was itself an outcome from a 2005 Open Space event with the same group. Both these events were loking at issues of emerging leadership in the not-for-profit sector (or the “for-benefit” sector, as I am starting to call it). One of the strong desired outcomes was a strong network of practitioners in the field.
The other day, Justin Ho, one of the sponsors, emailed participants to report on and invite people to some further follow up events:
We did a lot of work post-event and put a lot of thought together on how an Emerging Leaders Network could work. I am personally still very excited and committed to this idea and have had some really good conversations with a number of you already about it. Some good strides have been made, but as with many things being done off the side of one’s desk, it’s been a bit hard to spend some focused time on it lately!
But with all that in mind, a few of us have been talking and have decided to do an impromptu coffee on Tuesday, March 11th in Downtown Vancouver. Well, given that it’s a bit far away in the calendar, maybe it’s more ad hoc than impromptu. Either way, a few of us will be meeting at the Co-op office at 3:30pm (250-1166 Alberni Street, Vancouver) and then just find a coffee shop nearby to connect, share ideas, and talk a bit about the Emerging Leaders Network.
If you are in Downtown or will be on the 11th and would like to join us, let me know.
Oh and in case you haven’t seen it in your email inbox lately, the Co-op launched an eCampaign that came out of the Leading Change initiative called Passion For Work Week. It was last week and we have a few campaign posters online at http://www.leading-change.ca Hopefully some of you had your organization take part.
I’m sure Justin wouldn’t mind hearing from you if you are an emerging leader in this field either in British Columbia or elsewhere.