I'm going to take a stab at playing with a bunch of the ideas raised over the last few days. I'll respond to Harrison's post below in chunks. My comments are in blue:
-----Original Message----- From: OSLIST [mailto:osl...@listserv.boisestate.edu] On Behalf Of Harrison Owen Sent: Monday, February 17, 2003 7:41 AM To: osl...@listserv.boisestate.edu Subject: Already-thereness, Empowerment and Such One of the great things about OSLIST is the way conversations start at multiple points and then ebb and flow to form a common theme. Not unlike what happens in Open Space (because it is Open Space, I guess) this phenomenon appears to be but one more example of what we have been talking about. Emergent order. And John, I guess that makes us all "anarchists" ... although I have a little trouble with the word. I concede that the literal sense is correct, but the associations lead to some directions I would rather not go. I found myself getting into the same sort of trouble when I used the word metastasis to describe what seems to happen when space is opened in an organization. It can simply be closed down, but more often than not it subtly spreads rather like a cancer. Correct idea. Nasty thought. Oh Well. I'm going to enter some experimental territory here, so hold on for the ride. In reply to this notion of anarchism, I'm with you John. I think it is one way of describing in political terms that which Harrison and Stuart Kauffman describe in biological terms as "self=organization" and what I describe in social terms as "unschooling" and in historical terms as "decolonization." What is fundamental to all of these movements is this: we are invited to participate, and in choosing to doing so we become that which we are creating. It seems to me that "invitation" is absolutely critical to this venture because nothing external can truly impel us to meaningfully engage in these types of activities. The motivation is purely from within. And as we find our purpose, what Eva called "motivation" and what Alfie Kohn has called "intrinsic motivation" we begin to see that there is a big invitation waiting for us. The invitation to act with Spirit. It is, literally and figuratively, simply a matter of "taking a step" towards that place that suddenly places us in a situation where we are "self-organizing," "unschooling," "decolonizing," and so on. In fact, Bernd brought to mind a thought which also seems to me to be fundamental to this conversation when he raised Taoist "logic." In the I Ching, I understand that situations are described not as static markers on a road somewhere, but as dynamic processes. Therefore, what is often translated as "danger" is actually rendered in the Chinese as "being in danger." We have not approached some territory bounded in such a way that allows us the see where danger starts and where it ends, rather we have arrived in the moment of "being in danger" because of the choices we have made to put ourselves there. This is not to "blame the victim" but rather to subtly point to the concept of karma, understanding that the power to remove ourselves from these situations lies within each of us. The invitation to be in another situation surrounds us all the time, and sometimes it is absolutely present and manifests in concrete ways (what Christians might term "a calling") and other times it is subtle and deep and therefore must be uncovered with discerning processes like meditation, yoga or Open Space Technology, which does for the social body what meditation and yoga do for the physical body and the mind. So, anarchism, unschooling, decolonizing, and empowering are all processes. Quantum physicists describe these kinds of things as wave functions, as opposed to particles. The wave function is that form of reality that admits any possibility. The particle is that choice that is made, what is called the eigenstate. Eigenstates emerge as wave functions "collapse" which is the physics equivalent of closing space. All the possibilities become one specific reality. In Open Space, I think we try to invite organizations or communities to maintain the quantum wave state as much as possible, only collapsing that wave state from possibilities to activities through processes like convergence and action planning. This is why "closing the space" is so important to avoid on day one and two (of a 2.5 day event), and why we are tasked with "holding space" as facilitators. To collapse the wave function too soon is to admit that all the possibilities have been tasted and THIS ONE is the right one. When one person does that for the whole group, it is called tyranny. Anarchism, as I understand John to be using the term, is the opposite of this. Or as the actor Ozzie Davis said on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation yesterday as he spoke from the big peace rally in New York (hi Ted!): "When the people are in motion, the government is in session." Flipping brilliant. There's more. I suspect we may be one the edge of some new territory here in this discussion. The ideas have certainly appeared before, but I detect the possibility of a rather elegant formulation just hiding out at the edges. Way back in the Dark Ages (Riding The Tiger, 1991) I found myself thinking and writing about what I called then, The InterActive Learning Organization (aka The Open Space Organization). By '94 the same idea appeared in glorious new nomenclature with the arrival of The Millennium Organization. Looking back over those efforts, I have to confess that it may have been the right idea, but definitely looked at in the wrong way. Both the InterActive Learning Organization and The Millennium Organization (same thing by a new name) seemed to be something we might "do" -- as in "creating the Open Space Organization." Lovely idea, but fatally flawed, or at the very least, a waste of effort. Why create something that already exists? The problem was, we just didn't know it. I recall that we had this conversation last year when this list discussed at length Dee Hock's "chaordic organization." This seems to me to be a concept all about self-organization and distributed leadership that nevertheless is supposed to have it's genesis in a specific set of interventions. Almost but not quite, eh? Self-organization is always "here" Right here, right in this moment. It is not a place we are going to or coming from. It is right here, right now. The Millennium Organization (what a name!) is not something we "do" it is what we "are." So where do we go from here? I suggest starting with the basics. Really basic. It seems to me that certain fundamental forces pretty well account for our present existence. Gravity, for one, makes it possible to walk around on good old planet earth and do what we do. Perhaps we may chafe at the constraints, but truthfully there is not too much that we can do about it. The forces of self-organization provide a reasonable account for our progress from the moment of the Big Bang until this present instant. and please note, we didn't have to do a thing. It happened all by itself, or as Stuart Kaufmann would say -- Order for free. Add in one other "force" -- the power of Griefwork -- as it enables us to navigate the sometimes rocky terrain thrown up at us as we go on our self-organizing ways. The problem here is simply that as we, our organizations, and our world move along the path of self-organization, things come and go, they end. They die. Seen from some cosmic vantage point, this ending, this dying is simply a part of the natural process of things. However, when it becomes our end, or our death, cosmic vantage points become a little hard to find, and in fact everything becomes very personal. Fortunately for us, there appears to be hardwired within each one of us another natural process, which like the process of birth, brings most of us through the hard places, and that is Griefwork. At least that seems to be the story for the last 13.7 billion years (according to latest calculations, but what's a billion here or there?). Jumping to conclusions, it appears that if everything is self-organizing, everything is Open Space Organization! We're already there. We can stop working so hard trying to create what already exists, and better spend our time understanding what we already are. How do you like those bananas? I like them. That's what I'm noticing too. This idea of grief work as a fundamental tool is interesting too. I see what you are saying Harrison, but something feels to me like that's only part of the answer. When I work with the grief cycle, the thing that people respond to is the map. They can find themselves on the map and it validates what they are feeling. And of course because it is a map, it also points out some places they might go, and this is powerful for people, especially people who are in the midst of the anger or denial stage or that deeply unresourceful and collapsed point where all they want to do is sob. Knowing that it gets better can help honour that moment and open space for the pain of the "now" to be fully experienced. When someone leaves that stage it is with the knowledge that they had been fully present "there" and so there is no residual pain to carry forward as suffering. But I get the same reaction from people when I use Michael Herman's four quadrants (based on Wilber's, Arrien's and others) to help discern where an organization or community might be found in terms of the things that are preoccupying it at the moment. In fact, this reaction is so universal and powerful, that I use the four quadrants all the time now to both think through where people are at, and imagine where they might go. In terms of navigation, I think humans need two things. There is a basic need for maps to help us navigate, maps that show the human story as it has been played out over and over in our history. Maps like the Bible, or the I Ching, or the four quadrants, or the grief cycle. These maps give us comfort as things change, that there is really nothing new under the sun and that as stuck as we feel at the moment, there is always hope. Every climb has a descent, every mud pool we cross is held within banks of solid earth, every dark forest is bounded by open prairie, every stormy ocean has a shore. The second thing we need is a way of figuring out where we are. Maps of the land are no good if you don't know where you are on the map. So people carry astrolabes, or compasses or GPS systems and through "orientation" they figure out where they are. Only after you figure out where you are, does the map become useful. So orientation is a process, sometimes a quick thing and sometimes it can last a lifetime. In other realms, orientation takes the form of such things as meditation. Meditation can acquaint our selves with reality and makes surfing through volumes of Buddhist sutras meaningful and helpful. In grief work storytelling is the orienting process, and through the stories we tell, we get a sense of where we are in the grief process, where we are on the map. For organizations, Open Space is the best orienting practice I have ever seen. It combines a rich collection of other orienting practices like storytelling, silence, way-finding and inquiry to bring together a collective consciousness about where the organization is at. After a big juicy Open Space, suddenly the ground seems a little firmer, navigation seems to get easier and the maps make sense. Or sometimes you discover that the map you have been using (maybe it's a "strategic plan") has been the wrong one all along. It's all good, as Father Brian would say. But let's not mistake the process of orientation for the journey itself. Orienting processes are just one step along the journey. In fact, they are a necessary step, just to make sure the journey makes sense. I am not talking about a journey with a fixed destination or arrival point, but that purest of all journeys, the journey of Spirit, whereby we simply travel, and like sharks in the sea, by moving, we continue to breathe and stay alive. And what do we say about Open Space? For those of us who may have thought we created this wild, wonderful, novel critter -- it is doubtless time to eat a large amount of humble pie. We did not create a thing. In fact Open Space by other names had been doing just fine, thank you, for billions of years. But Open Space is not without its value, for it provides us with the opportunity to consciously and intentionally be what we already are. And who knows, we might just become better at it???? The practical applications? Well for one thing, the next time a client asks, "Does Open Space always work?" -- we might answer, "Truthfully we don't really know, but it seems to have done pretty well for the past 13.7 billion years." I am not sure that I would recommend this approach, unless undertaken with a very large smile. I think I've tried to expand upon the myriad of practical reasons why Open Space works. I've never really been comfortable with just saying "it always works" (smile or not) but then I've never really wanted to tell people the whole story, in case their learning was different. And yet, how to account for the fact that Elders sit in Open Space events and after a day proclaim the experience to be profoundly decolonizing? I know there is something very deep that happens to some people in Open Space, something beyond self-organization and grief work. I think it has to do with the acceptance of the invitation to enter the world of Spirit. Taking a step into that light is immediately transformative for individuals, communities and organizations. That we have stumbled upon a process for accelerating that in people who are ready, is nothing short of a precious miracle. Chris Harrison Harrison Owen 7808 River Falls Drive Potomac, MD 20854 USA phone 301-365-2093 Open Space Training www.openspaceworld.com <http://www.openspaceworld.com/> Open Space Institute www.openspaceworld.org <http://www.openspaceworld.org/> Personal website http://mywebpages.comcast.net/hhowen/index.htm osl...@listserv.boisestate.edu To subscribe, unsubscribe, change your options, view the archives of osl...@listserv.boisestate.edu Visit: http://listserv.boisestate.edu/archives/oslist.html * * ========================================================== osl...@listserv.boisestate.edu ------------------------------ To subscribe, unsubscribe, change your options, view the archives of osl...@listserv.boisestate.edu, Visit: http://listserv.boisestate.edu/archives/oslist.html * * ========================================================== osl...@listserv.boisestate.edu ------------------------------ To subscribe, unsubscribe, change your options, view the archives of osl...@listserv.boisestate.edu, Visit: http://listserv.boisestate.edu/archives/oslist.html
