How to Facilitate a Large Open Space Event

Allison and Jake co-facilitating a large Open Space
Allison and Jake co-facilitating a large open space event

Open Space events can be a great way to organize a large group of people to quickly and effectively address the issues that matter to them. People often leave amazed at how much they learned or accomplished, especially when the event started with an empty agenda. You probably loved an event you attended and now are wondering how to facilitate open space with a large group. Open space can be used within a company or community conference.

Jake and I have both facilitated open space events with 100-1000+ attendees. There is a lot of preparation that goes into making the event go smoothly—in advance of the event and the day-of. There’s more to facilitating open space than walking around a circle and explaining the principles!

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Communicating Change Effectively and Humanely

A railway switch, indicating a change ahead.
Change is inevitable. Communicating change effectively and humanely is a hallmark of effective managers.

“I can tell this is hard for you all to hear. I know it’s harder for some of you than others. It’s not my first choice, either. However, it makes enough sense, and it’s the direction we’re going now. We’ll take some time to work through how we feel about this. Then we need to figure out how to start making this change.”

Those weren’t exactly the words the Director of Engineering used to communicate the change in our team’s priorities, but they are close. It was certainly the message that those of us in the room heard when he told us about the abrupt shift in the direction we were about to make. This potentially disruptive change was one of my first experiences with communicating change effectively and humanely. Because of how the director held himself and the team during the ensuing conversation, what could have been an absolute mess turned into a surprisingly positive experience. 

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Two cubes with faces drawn on them and thought bubbles over them. The left face is thinking of a clean spiral and smiling. The right face is thinking of a tangled line and is frowning.

Share Information, Not Anxiety

Two cubes with faces drawn on them and thought bubbles over them. The left face is thinking of a clean spiral and smiling. The right face is thinking of a tangled line and is frowning.“I don’t want to distract the team. They don’t need to worry about this.” That’s what my boss – the head of engineering at a rapidly growing startup – told me when I asked him how he would share information from top management about our revised expansion plans. His job, he said, was to protect the engineers from things like this and to let them focus on building the product.

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A 3D pie chart divided in 60%, 30% and 10% sections.

Managing Team Performance with the 60-30-10 Rule

You’re a mid-level manager in a rapidly growing company. Your boss tells you that a new initiative the company has been considering for the last year has finally gotten the go-ahead from the executive team. This initiative is similar to others your company has taken on in the previous few years, but it is different in a few key ways. There’s no playbook for work like this; success will require trying new things and learning from what happens. Your job is to pull together a team that will perform at a high level in challenging circumstances. What do you do?

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Five differently color ropes knotted together to form a rough web or net.

Leadership Isn’t About You

Five differently color ropes knotted together to form a rough web or net.
Leadership enables individuals to work together to achieve results.

Managers everywhere struggle to lead teams. These teams don’t produce the desired results, leaving everyone frustrated. A common cause of this problem is managers falling into the trap of thinking that leadership is about them. When this happens, a change in perspective can help them regain effectiveness.

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Two railroad lines merging into one.

Ground Your Feedback in Mutual Purpose

Two railroad lines merging into one.
Feedback is more likely to be effective when it’s clear that you’re both heading in the same direction.

Many managers struggle to give effective feedback. They spend hours carefully crafting their message only to have it fail to land. What they neglect to notice is that feedback is at least as much about the relationship as it is about the message. One of the keys to a strong working relationship – one that enables difficult conversations – is a sense of shared purpose.

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An air traffic control radar panel displaying the locations and other vital information about several airplanes.

Monitoring Three Processes to Help Team Performance

An air traffic control radar panel displaying the locations and other vital information about several airplanes.
Monitoring team processes “in flight” means you can notice where they could be made more effective.

A high-performing team meets or exceeds its clients’ expectations, becomes more effective over time, and helps all members learn and grow. A high-performing team is not merely highly productive; it is anti-fragile. Teams reach high performance through a complex process of development. How can you tell if it is moving along that path or needs a corrective nudge? By monitoring three key team processes.

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A lush vegatable garden in large planter boxes surrounded by a gravel path.

Conditions for High-Performing Teams, Part 2

A lush vegatable garden in large planter boxes surrounded by a gravel path.
Developing high-performing teams is about attending to the conditions that help them thrive.

Why do some teams perform at a high level while others struggle? To be clear, when I talk about a high-performing team, I mean one that is highly productive, continues to improve over time, and develops all of the people who are part of it. Teams are complex systems, so you cannot directly cause a team to perform at a high level or predict with certainty that it will or won’t. You can, however, create conditions that make it more likely a team will develop in the way you hope.

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