The One with the Open Space Session

We had our Open Space on Friday and I actually ended up doing two sessions because I felt the board wasn’t full enough so I added another session, about Bullet Journals. It wasn’t really good though. I was very unprepared and had a giant headache from spending too much time in small meeting rooms.

But the first session about stress management and mindfulness was great. I was really nervous when I started, especially because our CEO was actually in the room and I had no idea what he would think about such a topic. Many people don’t see topics like that as valuable and think things like therapy and meditation are just a load of crap. He didn’t, though.

I talked a bit about this emotional competences training program and then we started talking more about stress management and mindfulness in general. One attendee talked about Google’s mindful leadership program, we exchanged little tips and tricks to react more mindfully in difficult situations and talked a bit about team communication.

Every session was told to fill out a canvas with things like who attended, what people learned and possible next steps. I didn’t really think there could be next steps from my session, but since all the attendees agreed that it would be awesome to get more people in our company to see the value of mindfulness, we decided to find a place to put some resources.

At the end of this Open Space, our 4 company managers could choose one of the sessions to “sponsor”, to help the session host (or someone else willing to work on their topic further) to get the time and resources to implement the next steps. There were some sessions with more actionable and business-focused topics and four of them were chosen to be sponsored. And then the CEO asked if he could choose my session as a second one. Yay! I have absolutely no idea what to do with this now (aside from putting some resources in a public folder somewhere) but we will see. One colleague from Hamburg immediately said she wanted to help out as well so we might be able to do something nice with this. Yay!