Today a post by Peter Buys on the OSLIST caught my eye…
I am fully convinced that Open Space is a marvelous tool to stimulate individual creativity; spontaneous collaboration (for the duration of the Open Space event); and an expression of trust in people by the client (in other words the ones who bought / decided for the Open Space event)…Many if not most Open Spaces are only very short blips (events) in typically much longer processes of change. But the Open Space does not really address that issue nor does it really offer (as far as I know) options on how to proceed beyond the time-bound Open Space event.
I am not a professional facilitator of short term events, in the sense that I only live of assignments for such one time events. Rather I work as a facilitator of long term processes in a specific sector (since 8 years the water sector). When dealing with long term processes of change, as a facilitator, one is obliged (I feel) to think beyond one time events and
rather constantly look for options and ‘most appropriate’ facilitation methods and tools for specific phases or steps in such processes. That means that one time Open Space may seem adequate, another time it can be one of the many other methods, tools, instruments that are at the disposal of a facilitator….
At times, I must admit, I feel ‘professional facilitators’ of one-off events (like an Open Space event) think fairly lightly about what will happen next and what kind of facilitation may be appropriate. It is not in their terms of reference, so why bother. Do I see this correctly?
I agree. Organizations and communities have a life long before an event and a life long after the event. One event does not create change.
As an OST facilitator I spend easily 75% of my time with a client preparing the ground for an Open Space event and getting very clear about how action is to be supported. The process is not magic…what makes it sustainable is the practice before, during and after the event. If a leader can work with participants and members of the organization or community to develop practices that support Open Space, then the results that one experiences in an event such as emergent leadership, passion and responsibility, deep engagement and so on, can be supported moving forward. It is then that the people in the organization become learners of practice and practitioners of their learning.
Open Space is powerful often because it challenges traditional notions of control, management and leadership. People get excited because they see what happens when we do things a little differently. But with no sense of how all of this gets grounded into the life of the organization and community, there is no harvest of the benefits, and no tendency towards change.
Michael Herman and I have called this part of working in Open Space “Grounding” and that represents a whole set of practices that is about supporting action, aligning work with the natural flow of work in the organization, and making it all real – “getting it out of the room with integrity.”
Grounding practices complement the other practices we teach and write about: Opening, Inviting and Holding. Without grounding, the work stays in the ether.
I think this is true, by the way, of any short term intervention aimed at facilitating “change” in the organization. Working with leaders and participants in Open Space needs good coaching and needs facilitation that not only opens and holds space but, in the words of the International Association of Facilitators, teaches new ways of thinking. It is for this reason that I believe we facilitators have to align our use of Open Space as a process with the practices that we also live in our life. If we view OS (or any process) as simply a tool without being in ncomplete alignment with it, then it doesn’t provide the fullest possible potential ground for work.
I am not an advocate of using OST for everything. I am a strong advocate of using OST where leadership is willing to practice opening and invitatation, where they hold and trust people and have a stroing sense of how the work can be grounded. If we have those conditions and we have urgency, passion, complexity and diversity, then we can play marvellously, everytime, with results that last.
Here’s a report on an OST meeting that I did on the weekend for a really interesting project which got youth to monitor violations of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child in the city of Vancouver.
The project was the brainchild of a number of organizations in the Vancouver, who came together to ask about how the UN convention could be used to draw attention to some of the pressing issues faced by children and youth in Vancouver. These issues included experiences in the child welfare system, poverty, lack of equitably funded education opportunities in poor neighbourhoods, safety and treatment by police, transit security and others in power.
The project lasted over two months during which youth facilitators working with a team at the City of Vancouver set out to hold focus groups to educate youth about the Convention, and to gather information from youth themselves on rights violations. More than that though, the youth were also invited to create visions for the future and for the society that they wanted to see, and these visions were harvested through words and pictures.
All of this work through local neighbourhood organizations culminated this past Friday and Saturday. Thirty-five youth gathered on Friday, to meet one another, build community and most importantly, reflect on their experience in the process and create a performance piece that would express a summary of what the project had learned. The performance itself involved the construction of a mural, some spoken word and rap, music and playback theatre. Parts of the performance were in English, Spanish, Portuguese, Hebrew and Russian.
Saturday morning, leaders from various levels of government and organizations were invited to join the youth in Open Space to figure out where to go forward. The project was officially over on the Saturday, and so we wanted to create a space in which the messages would get sent and an invitation made from the youth to the adults to work together to keep alive the spirit of what was happening. Fifty-five people gathered Saturday morning, and the youth did their performance which kicked off a short and intense Open Space. There was some significant power in the room, including two Members of the Provincial Legislative Assembly one of whom is the the provincial child welfare critic. Topics raised included what to do to help youth live independently and in safe conditions, stopping police harassment of Aboriginal and Latino youth by working with the police, and educating youth and adults on rights. All of the groups were composed of both youth and adults and the feeling in the room was one of possibility and optimism, despite the huge nature of some of the changes that were being discussed. To have provincial politicians sitting in the room with street youth, working together to move forward the learnings from the project was a powerful experience.
Increasingly I am seeing the possibility involved in bringing creative expression into play with youth working in Open Space. I know there have been many conversations about playback theatre in the Open Space community over the years, but, being a little slow on the uptake sometimes, I’m just now beginning to see how it integrates with OST work. The creative pieces, and the process of creating something together, is another practice ground for passion bounded by responsibility, and youth find their voices in many different ways when they are invited to work together to create art which is used as an invitation for action. There are a number of places in which I think this can be a significant combination and I’ll be looking for opportunities like this over the next little while. In the meantime, if you have had experience combining youth, creativity and Open Space together, let me know so I can continue to expand my horizons on this a little bit.
The Open Space Practices
An email on the OSLIST today prompted me to find the story of the Open Space event I did in Alaska with Judi Richardson and Michael Herman. The event was a gathering of 200 middle school students, teachers and counsellors and the theme was “Becoming a Peacemaker.” Over the months that followed Julie sent stories about Open Space blossoming all over Alaska and Michael collected and posted them at his site.
That was also the first time we offered the Open Space practice workshop together in a two day format. We had 60 people in that initial training, and in the next year Michael and I offered it together and separately in Canada, the USA, Ireland, India, Nepal, Australia and New Zealand.
Last week I was with 15 remarkable people near Nanaimo on Vancouver Island offering the most recent iteration of the workshop, a three day version that really builds on the practices of Open Space. We feel now we are truly moving into the realm of practice in a deeper way, teaching learning and writing about it.
So here’s a marker to remember where it all began.
Over the past few weeks I have been working hard in Victoria facilitating the Aboriginal engagement strategy for the Victoria Urban Development Agreement.The work unfolded in two stages, with the first stage being three focus groups on economic, physical and social issues. We used the ICA Focused Conversations methodology to deepen and inquire into the participants experience of their community. Objective data was recorded as mind maps which we then overlay with data harvested from the reflective, interpretive and decisional parts of the conversations.
Following the focus groups, we conducted a large 1.5 day community meeting to gather issues and challenges from the community itself. The first day was an Open Space meeting which brought 60 people together including a number of homeless and virtually homeless folks. This was followed on day two with a World Cafe which we called an “Action Cafe” aimed at discovering strategies for keeping this process alive within the larger development agreement process. We knew we had the right people in the room when at lunch an announcement was made that “a shopping cart was illegally parked!”
Following the conclusion of the cafe, we had fiddling and dancing from some Metis performers and Coast Salish and Kwagiulth drum songs from Victoria’s Unity Drummers.
It has been a rich experience working on this project. For more information, see what one of the community groups, the Inner City Aboriginal Society, wrote about our work. And for more photos, visit the Flickr page for “A Community at Work.”
Victoria, BC
My two favourite processes of the moment, and there are people all over the place looking at ways to combine them.
Today, Christine Whitney Sanchez sends the report from her latest effort, which used OST and World Cafe to work with up to 2000 people at the National Girls Scouts Convention in the USA. The proceedings are online.
Tomorrow I am about to do the same thing, beginning a two day conversation with the Aboriginal community of Victoria. Christine’s efforts are my inspiration tonight.