I ran a small one day OS today, and thought I would share the story as there are occasionally requests for how to run small ones.

The group was a unit in a larger federal government office.  In their daily lives the unit members mostly interact with people from other units, and not with each other.  As a result, the unit has something of a "muskox" mentality -- a metaphor derived from an animal that forms a circle with others for protection by facing outwards.  In this case,
facing outwards means that the unit members collaborate with others, but rarely within in their unit.

The OS was around the question of how the unit could respond to some office wide policy initiatives, so it forced the group members to focus on the life of the unit rather than their individual projects.  This was the original reason I suggested OS to the Director.

The plan for the day was three one hour dialogue sessions, followed by a lunch break and a visit from the office's CEO.  My plan was to have the reports completed over lunch and during the CEO meeting and ready for some convergence in the afternoon.

We had nine people, about half of whom had done an OS.  The circle was too small to walk around so I sat in a chair with the rest of them, but I leaned in a little at the beginning to do my opening.  We had 12 agenda items come forward.  When it was time to sign up, the group merged some items together and ended up with six, then they decided that they all wanted to go to all of them, so they stayed together as a group and worked over the next three hours on the issues.  Time definitely blurred, and as there were no competing sessions, the OS principles relating to starting and ending were in clear evidence.  They talked as long as they needed too, and covered all the issues, which eventually got merged into four reports.

The space remained open during lunch and the arrival of the CEO, who joined the circle and picked up where the group had left off.  She spent two hours with the group in some pretty free flowing dialogue, while I prepared the rest of the room for convergence.

When the CEO left, the group reconvened in the original circle (they moved between this circle and a table which they spent the morning meeting around -- not my choice, but what happened was...anyway it worked for them) and we did a full convergence of the four topic areas.  When I asked for a volunteer to convene the convergence, the one true
butterfly volunteered, gave the group a half an hour and was draconian in getting them focussed on the task at hand.  This was exactly what the group wanted, and it ensured that they got finished on time, without rehashing issues.

Everything ran so smoothly that I was able to email the conference proceedings back to their office (four blocks away) before they had packed up and left.

Doing OS in a small group is definitely possible, but for the facilitator there are some special challenges.  I was very visible throughout the whole day as I tried to make myself disappear, but staying in the room made me stick out and in leaving I was conspicuous in my absence.  A couple of people noticed this and felt uncomfortable with how much I was charging vs how little I appeared to be doing.  I just smiled.  They were truly a self-facilitating group, so there was
little for me to do anyway, but I did feel uncomfortable.  I wonder how it would have been if there was a lot of conflict and they felt like they needed a facilitator.  I would have been between a rock and a hard place there. At any rate, it's not like a large conference, where you can just slip away.  Even picking up coffee cups was distracting to them.

In truth, my work was really done when I did the opening because it got the items that needed to be talked about out in the open.  From there, it became a long conversation around those points.  I don't think they would have come up with an identical agenda if we had used another meeting process.

Another lesson is that holding the space for nine people is as taxing as holding the space for 250.  I figured this would be the case, so I didn't skimp on my preparation, and I'm glad I didn't.  I needed all my wits and strength to be quiet in that room for 6.5 hours.

One advantage of working in a small group is that you get a lot more flexibility with time, and it meant that we were able to do more convergence than I initially thought possible, and it meant that everyone could participate in that.

So for those of you contemplating very small OS events, take heart, it can be done.  My one recommendation is to use a fairly large room with lots of space in it so you can fade away when you need to.  There's also something nice about a small group meeting in large space.  They tend to become hushed and considerate and respectful, like a small congregation in a cathedral.  They chunk down the space to suit their needs but remain aware of the large amount of space around them.  It's a little humbling, and makes for a useful environment to diffuse control issues.