Barack Obama famously crowd-sourced the finance for his election campaign, a powerful example of the ability of new technology to create a great aggregate result out of lots of small voluntary actions. But this process is not as new as it seems: Sir James Murray used a similar approach to creating the Oxford English Dictionary, a project he began in 1897.
Posts Tagged ‘positive co-creation’
A Self-Organising Meeting
The Open Space process allows people to contribute to conversations that interest and energise them. It ensures that all topics that need to be discussed, are discussed. It allows people to add value to the discussions in a way that works for them. It disrupts established patterns of organisational behaviour, allowing new voices, views, opinions and perspectives to be heard and developed.
What’s It For?
The World Café process is designed to help people talk together, exchanging ideas and developing their thinking about an issue in a relaxed, informal, yet purposive way. In small ‘café groupings’ of no more than six people, groups discuss particular questions or topics with the aim of expanding their understanding of their own and others’ views and of the possibilities. World Café is useful in many contexts, and excels when the main object is to connect and explore around a particular topic. At its best it produces conversation that connects, has energy, is emergent, magic and values not knowing as well as knowledge.
Simu-Real is a technique used to represent an organisation to itself by showing its members how the different parts of the organisation affect each other in their work. By showing how the behavior of the constituent pieces of the whole have unforeseen or unappreciated consequences elsewhere in the organisation it allows the participants to analyse and change their ways of working to be more helpful to each other. Here are answers to some commonly asked questions about Simu-Real.
The Challenge
Five strangers have two hours to prepare for a three-hour consulting session with a client they have never met.
We are a British woman, a Greek woman, two Dutch men, and a Dutch woman. All of us have volunteered to try to help this organisation as part of our two-day experience at the 11th meeting of the Begeistring Network, a European network of people interested in Appreciative and strengths-based ways of working, at Volendam in Holland April 27-29 2011.
We will be working in English throughout. On our first evening we had about an hour to start planning how we might usefully use this opportunity.