Dear friends and colleagues in Open Space, I have been thinking about the implications of this list and Open Space on Open Space as vehicles through which there is communication across cultures. Cross cultural communication and cross cultural conflict resolution have been among my work passions for a few decades. In both contexts we have chosen to use English as our common language. Did we choose it? Or did some people comply with the norm somehow? Anyway, we have English and we find ourselves in difficult spots sometimes and I think some of this is because we are not sensitive enough to each other's interpretations of similar words in English. I think there are many different interpretations of Spirit. Based on country of origin. Yet we handle it as though there is a similar interpretation. Likewise, I think there are many different interpretations of other words. I think this was a culprit at OSONOS and we did our best with it (and thank you to our hosts for having the conference in English). Do any of you have any thoughts on this? Any suggestions for how we can do well with our international conversations?
Birgitt
