Everybody, (anybody?),
I stumbled on this, yesterday. Note that it cites Kaufmann for it's
inspiration.
http://www.openspaceworld.com/brief_history.htm
It's a system, called for some reason "Open Space Technologies", for
organizing meetings and moving toward consensus.
My Calvinist curmudgeon nature tends to automatically deplore this sort of
thing, (Any time I see chairs arranged in a circle, my first impulse is to run
screaming from the room.) But I have to admit, it interested me. The trick is
that if there is more than one circle, the group can reorganize spontaneously.
I guess people are dragging their chairs around the room.
The hedonist in me particularly liked:
The Law is the so called Law of Two Feet, which states simply, if at any time
you find yourself in any situation where you are neither learning nor
contributing use your two feet and move to some place more to your liking.
Such a place might be another group, or even outside into the sunshine. No
matter what, don't sit there feeling miserable. The law, as stated, may sound
like rank hedonism, but even hedonism has its place, reminding us that unhappy
people are unlikely to be productive people.
Ah, the years I spent in Department Meetings when I could have been "outside in
the sunshine!"!
I bet Steve Guerin will like:
The lesson from Open Space is a simple one. The only way to bring an Open Space
gathering to its knees is to attempt to control it. It may, therefore, turn out
that the one thing we always wanted (control) is not only unavailable, but
unnecessary. After all, if order is for free we could afford being out of
control and love it. Emergent order appears in Open Space when the conditions
for self organization are met. Perhaps we can now relax, and stop working so
hard.
Anybody out there have any experience with it?
Nick
Nicholas S. Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology,
Clark University ([email protected])
http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/
http://www.cusf.org [City University of Santa Fe]
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