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 …
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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 …
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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 …
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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 …
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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. …