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Collaborative Tools

Collaborative Tools

Open Space Meeting Facilitation

You’ve been to your fair share of meetings and conferences where you either leave uninspired, or you’re energized while you’re there, but the energy fails to translate long term back at the office.

 

Open Space, developed by Harrison Owen, replaces traditional meeting methods and brings life back to the organization and the organization back to life.

 

Open Space enables all kinds of people, in any type of organization, to create inspired communities, where ordinary people work together to create extraordinary results with regularity.

 

Open Space can be scheduled for 3 hours to 3+ days, and can include 5 to 2500+ people. 

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A Quick Tour Through an Open Space Meeting

 Open Space works best when:

  • the work to be done is complex

  • the people and ideas involved are diverse

  • the passion for ideas and resolution (and even potential for conflict) are high

  • and the time to get it done was yesterday

 

Participants create and manage their own agenda around a central theme of strategic importance, such as:
 

What is the plan of action that all stakeholders in the organization can support and work together to create?
OR
How can we re-ignite passion in our company and look forward to building a future that engages all?

World Cafe Large Group Dialogue

World Café is a creative process for leading collaborative dialogue, sharing knowledge and creating possibilities for action in groups of any size.

 

Café Conversations are one way that communities, businesses, governments, and people from all walks of life create a common purpose, share knowledge, make more intelligent decisions, and call forth life-affirming action together.

 

The methodology of the World Café is simple:
 

  • The environment is set up like a café, with small tables, tablecloths covered by poster paper, flowers, markers and, if possible, candles, quiet music and refreshments.
     

  • People sit three to four to a table and have a series of 3 conversational rounds lasting from 20 to 45 minutes each about questions which are personally meaningful.
     

  • At the end of each round, one person remains at each table as the host, while each of the other three travel to separate tables. Table hosts welcome newcomers to their tables and share the essence of that table's conversation so far. The newcomers relate any conversational threads which they are carrying — and then the conversation continues, deepening as the rounds progress.
     

  • After three rounds, the whole group gathers to share and explore emerging themes, insights, and learnings. These are captured in order to make the collective intelligence of the whole group visible to everyone, so they can reflect on what is emerging in the room. 

Image by Wade Austin Ellis

Why does World Cafe work? 

As we engage networks of human systems with compelling questions in a shared network of conversation, intelligence emerges as the system connects to itself in diverse and creative ways, and the future is born with all the collective wisdom and resources we need.

Other Collaborative Tools and Methods We Engage

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