When should LSI be used?                                     print     home

 How do we respond to fundamental changes in our markets and environment? How is active commitment to achieve critical goals created? How can we become more productive? How do we create an attractive and sustainable community?

Everywhere leaders are wrestling with such tough questions, which necessitate responses that require best efforts and effective actions. Large Scale Interventions bring people together to build a framework that supports shared agreements for action. It can do this no matter how different their roles, status, area of expertise, opinion or culture, unleashing the energy of your organisation, aligning action with innovation and creative results. It also supports fast change. LSI enables (very larges numbers of) people to work together and:

• Understand the need for change
• Analyse current reality, in relation to the past and to possible futures
• Design and perform the change process

The LSI-approach is the right choice if you want to :

• Deal with complex situations, with unresolved questions
• Develop a sense of community, even among very different participants
• Facilitate breakthrough thinking and innovation
• Create a clear picture for everyone in the company/organisation/community and thus focus energies
• Produce breakthrough results in cases of urgent problems
• Facilitate "multi-stakeholder" processes in developing countries

The following are contraindications for LSI:

• management or board wants to tell or sell something (no participation, no flexibility for action learning)
• sponsor is unwilling or unable to meet the design principles
• sponsor has no intention of implementing action plans
• conflict management concerns personal issues (not focused on the whole system)
• minor or simple changes are the goal
• there are hidden agendas

figure from "Transformation and Leadership, Open Space practice for peace" by Harrison Owen
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