Oregon PDMA/PMF Conference Part 3: Space is Always Open

In the afternoon, the conference had an Open Space session where the attendees "design their own conference." Diana Larsen of Futureworks Consulting got us going with a description of the process and the ground rules, while we sat in one giant circle.

People nominated themselves to be session hosts, simply by writing a topic on a piece of paper, choosing one of two times and a location then posting it on the "Marketplace" bulletin board. Then we chose the topics we most wanted to discuss. "Butterflies" chose to work by themselves rather than join groups, but Diana claimed that butterflies would tend to cluster and I did see that happen. "Bumblebees" buzzed from session to session, pollinating one session with ideas from another.

For the first time, I participated in a lively discussion on "Cultural Change for Collaboration" where we talked about the importance of getting senior leaders to behave collaboratively themselves to foster collaboration in the rest of the organization. To do that, we need to make sure that people understand the relationships between collaboration and decision-making, which can take many forms.

I was a bit of a bumblebee in the second session, drifting between topics like Cultural Issues in Global Collaboration, How to Get Anti-social Engineers to Collaborate, and Collaborating with the "Man on the Mountain." This final topic was an interesting lesson in collaboration, because the people drawn to it talked for at least twenty minutes before I observed that we all had a different picture of the "Man on the Mountain" - who he was and why he was up there.

I"ve organized conferences and I'm a bit of a control freak so I wasn't sure how Open Space would work. But the topics were interesting, the session hosts and participants brought their passion into the room and the discussions were interesting and fruitful - much more so than an endless series of passive slideshows.