Harrison, you said: "And now - at long last - back to Open Space Technology as a halfway technology. A halfway technology, in case you don't know, is something you do just to get started. It may seem grand and glorious, not to say wonderful and elegant at the beginning. But over time the true colors appear. It is just plain clunky. Why on earth should it be necessary to sit in a circle, create a bulletin board, open a market place - just to be what we already are? Seems like an awful lot of wasted effort, useless work. We have been accused with some justification of inventing the ultimate scam in which the client does all the work, and even writes the report - while we do little or nothing. I find myself wondering how to radicalize all this - so that we totally go out of business. All being. No doing."
Which in my mind is pretty much the same as what florin said (what good company you keep!): "the practice of OST and the experience of OS taught me to agree that change don´t ask for our ideas about change. change is taking place and direction in every moment. change is using me as facilitator in the only way that can happen to me in that time and moment. success and outcome is happening in the moment of thinking about success and outcome. working in open space is already success and outcome like every doing is already success and outcome. OST gives space to become concious that there is nothing beside open space. intention is not to be realized in the future. intention is touching me to act in the now, giving space to change my intentions in every doing." All of which helps me get a handle on what I'm being/doing in the world these days, which is to be present, open, and alive to 15 staff, 120 preschool children, and their 240-or-so parents and care takers. My first six months as the "leader" of this organization have been wracked with turmoil as who I am came in contact with an organizational culture that many experienced as painful. As florian puts it, "change is using me as facilitator." I didn't come into the organization intending the changes that have occurred. The changes simply came about when my being encountered the organization's being. (My being, I'm told, has a stubborn streak, and doesn't tend to back down unless convinced of the rightness of doing so.) So, Harrison, this idea all being, no doing is an interesting one. Our being creates doing in the world. Our energy manifests. Can't stop it. As for OST, I live it, breathe it, do it every day all day. But in this new culture I've entered, I don't talk about it or explain it or define it. I don't facilitate it. I am it. Sometimes this way of being in my community feels great, and other times it feels terrible. Everything is invited, and everything comes in. I've taken lots of emotional hits for problems that existed long before I arrived. Some days I go home feeling like a human punching bag. That is the price I pay, many days, for inviting and expressing openness and authenticity. It is a price I gladly pay. I hope against hope that we're in that muddle-mindedness that precedes emergence or demergence (did I get those terms right?), and that we're well on our way to emerging to a more healthy state. Hmmmmm..... maybe that's the big difference. Doing OST (as a facilitator) means you invite, but you don't engage. Being OST (or just being in the way florian describes) means you do both at the same time. My experience so far is that doing both is painful. That is probably a reflection of the energy of the community I entered. I wonder what's on the other side. Julie * * ========================================================== [email protected] ------------------------------ To subscribe, unsubscribe, change your options, view the archives of [email protected]: http://listserv.boisestate.edu/archives/oslist.html To learn about OpenSpaceEmailLists and OSLIST FAQs: http://www.openspaceworld.org/oslist
