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Open Space on Open Space
As part of my holidays I spent three days at the OSonOS, which is the annual conference for Open Space practitioners. For those who don’t know Open Space Technology here’s an excellent intro. To me it is quite simply an incredibly efficient meeting form, which treats people as adults capable of making their own choices.
It was an excellent conference. I loved meeting people from all over the world, and I really enjoyed getting deeper into Open Space. And the venue was fantastic. It was held at Bramstrup a little south of Odense in a barn. It may sound weird, but the place was beautiful and worked perfectly for our needs. Meals were taken in the old cow stables and the food was equally excellent. If you’re planning some large meeting in Denmark, consider Bramstrup as your venue.
As always Open Space worked its magic, and the sessions we had were productive, constructive, interesting and lots of fun. You can see the entire report from the conference. I hosted these two sessions: Short OS meetings and Freedom and OS.
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Book review: Learned optimism
Of course I’ve been reading while I was on holidays, and it fit very well that I was reading about optimism. Martin Seligman has long researched optimism and positive psychology, and Learned Optimism is the popular summary of his work.
But why be optimistic? Shouldn’t you just be a realist? Well, here are a few good reasons for being an optimist:
* Optimists lead better lives
* Optimists live longer
* Optimists are healthier
* Optimists do better at work and in school
* Optimists have fewer depressions
* Optimists have more friends and better social livesAnd did you know that:
* The most optimistic candidate has won nine out of ten american presidential elections from 1948 to 1984
* The most optimistic sports teams outperform the pessimistic ones
* An insurance company that started hiring based on optimism rather than skill got much better salesmen out of it
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I’m back
Today is my first work day after a long and excellent holiday, and MAN it’s good to be back.
Here are a few highlights from our holiday:
* Travelling through Germany, Holland and Denmark without once having to show our passports.
* Goliath and Colossos.
* Amsterdam by bicycle .
* Helping an old man push his ice-cream-cart-scooter up a hill that it couldn’t climb and getting two ice creams for it.
* The small twisty roads in the Harz region of Germany
* Getting in a mile-long traffic jam on a German highway and just riding our motorcycles throught the gaps between stalled cars.
* Portuguese tapas in Amsterdam.By the way, I kicked of my first working day with giving a speech to 12 employees from Novo about happiness at work, and it went extremely well! In short, I’m back and I’m flying! And thanks to guest blogger Carsten for his blog entry.
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Good Work Project
Okay, here is a little guest blogger entry.
I saw Alexander this weekend at the countryside and he looked extremely well, tanned and happy – even without work ;-) Especially in volleyball and inventing games with the kids his karma shone.
Ok, I am the friend that Alexander has mentioned in other entries and I am proud to write on his site.
The sharing I would like to do here is to share a website about “The Good Work Project”. The guys behind this are no less than Howard Gardner (inventor of the Multiple Intelligences), Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi (inventor of the concept of “Flow” and William Damon (probably inventor of something cool as well).
Through its various studies, The Good Work project, researches how leading professionals carry out work that is of high quality and socially responsible. Exciting….
If you want to know more about this, then go to: www.goodworkproject.org
Cheers out there!
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50 (count’em) book reviews
I’m now up to 50 (count’em) book reviews on the site. I promised myself I’d make it before my holiday and I have. I even saved my favourite book (Cryptonomicon) for review number 50. See ya in september!
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Book review: Cryptonomicon
Okay, here’s a novel in which the central themes are cryptology (making and breaking codes), nerds and world war II. Sounds boring, huh? But Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson is an amazing work and it’s 900 pages do not contain a single boring passage.
The story is amazingly complex and has as many as five parallel tales set either during world war ii or today. Nerds, marines, scientists and one very strange priest from a mysterious order, all involved in plots and counter-plots that span more than 50 years.
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Book review: Open Space Technology
If you want to read about open Space Technology, this book is the only place to start. Harrison Owen who came up with the concept, explains the practicalities and the history of Open Space meetings in his usual clear, engaging and entertaining way.
Open Space meetings are characterized by their ability to consistently create the right background for incredible achievements. They are amazingly efficient and they also create enthusiasm, stimulate the open exchange of ideas and avert most conflicts. To me, Open Space is the meeting form that most acknowledges us as independent, self-reliant humans capable of taking responsility for ourselves and others.
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Book review: Smart mobs
Stuff’s changing all around us. New technologies are changing the way we work, interact and even how we conduct our courtship rituals. From I-mode services in Japan to the hitech millieu of Scandinavia to president-toppling demonstrations in Manilla to cyborgs in the US who want to merge body and machine. And much of this change goes unnoticed or is rapidly integrated in our lives and taken for granted.
Imagine a group of people united in some cause. The cause can be anything from celebrity spotting in New York to anti-WTO demonstrations in Seattle. Now imagine the same group of people always connected to the net, to each other, always able to monitor opponents and competitors. That’s a smart mob. And trying to predict how people will act and interact when wireless networks, constant internet access, camera video phones etc. become widespread is the aim of this book, Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution by Howard Rheingold.
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