Thanks Harrison, compassionate tour guide on community building. My pushback in
this is the notion of building. Building in an engineering process where
success is measured by compliance to even the most enlightened and
well-intentioned models and blueprints. If community is something that emerges
from freedom to share responsibility for what matters, its authentic form is
not engineered. In fact any attempt at engineering prevents natural emergence
that in the more unfortunate cases call for even more engineering .... and so
on and on.
When I was a wee lad, I read everything the Berrigan brothers wrote. They were
the wild political and social activist Jesuits. They used to talk about
community as re-membering. It's a beautiful image on many levels; that we
literally re-member as a community into our intrinsic wholeness. And this comes
about in Open Space simply by how the principles and law, the circle and
invitations remind us. In that re-membering, we discover new ways of being
community.
Jack
~~~~~~~~~~
jack ricchiuto
two.one.six/three.seven.three/seven.four.seven.five
www.designinglife.com / www.appreciativeleadership.org
------------Original Message------------
From: Harrison Owen <hho...@comcast.net>
To: osl...@listserv.boisestate.edu
Date: Sat, May-14-2005 9:59 AM
Subject: Community Building (Transformative and Otherwise)
When I first read Scott Peck's work ("A Road Less Traveled", "A Different
Drum", etc) I experienced a deep resonance and profound learning. This
fellow knew what he was talking about and had spent no small amount of time
considering what he had to say. With the possible exception of Martin Buber,
Peck understood and expressed the deep elements of community and
connectedness better than just about anybody that I knew. And yet, over the
years (he started writing in the early '80s) as I witnessed his and his
associates' attempts to apply these understandings I felt a growing sense of
disconnect. It was not that Peck was in any profound sense "wrong," but
rather that the passage from insight to application never quite seemed to
happen.
The concrete manifestation of Peck's approach was the Community Building
programs that I, Glory, and thousands of others participated in. These
programs were, as Glory correctly states, deeply moving, terribly
disturbing, and very profound. Initially the participants were what I might
call the cognoscenti - the searchers and thinkers who grooved on such
things. Eventually their application spread to the broader community, and
there was considerable effort made to bring the enterprise into the
corporate world - with some success. The impact was undeniable, but
increasingly the niggling question arose - After the program, what do you
do? Where do you go from here?
It always seemed to remind me of the "T Group" experience emanating from
such institutions as NTL (National Training Labs). Profound learning
occurred at both a personal and general level concerning the function of
groups. And major effort was dedicated to the transfer of this experience
and learning into the life of organizations of all sorts, an effort that
continues (NTL is, so far as I know, alive and well). But there was no
denying that the processes utilized were detailed and controlling, almost to
the point of tediousness. If we could only build effective interaction and
productive community by going through all of this, it always seemed to me
that it would be a cold day in hell before any useful result would be
broadly present. The learning was powerful, the experience profound, the
research of high caliber - but the broad application and impact was wanting.
At approximately the same time the Scott Peck began writing, and somewhat
after the T-Group phenomenon, Open Space Technology came into being. As you
all know, OST did not arrive courtesy of careful research and endless field
tests. It arose out of frustration, laziness and two martinis. But it worked
in some remarkable ways, not all of which were immediately apparent. In fact
it took some 5 years from inception (1985) to discover that not only was it
productive and fun, but also that some serious positive human behaviors
showed up - apparently all by themselves. I have characterized these as High
Learning, High Play, Appropriate structure and control - and last, but by no
means least - Genuine Community. I am not sure that Scott Peck actually uses
the words Genuine Community, but it is a natural correlate to his
"pseudo-community." And as near as I can remember, I used the phrase thanks
to him. He taught me what to look for.
The interesting thing is that in Open Space, Genuine Community seemingly
happens all by itself. There are no community building exercises, extensive
and (I would say) intrusive facilitator interventions, or carefully
prescribed procedures and processes that the group involved must perform -
unless you count sitting in a circle, creating a bulletin board, and opening
a market place to be such a process. Perhaps even more remarkable, Genuine
Community appears even under the most stressful and conflicted situations -
to the point that it almost seems that the greater the initial conflict and
stress the deeper and more profound the Genuine Community. And nobody does a
thing - it just happens.
After wallowing in this mystery for 10 years, it eventually dawned on this
benighted soul that the obvious, clear, and probably only explanation is
that Genuine Community is a naturally occurring function of a well dispose
Self-Organizing system. Duh! Or put slightly differently - Community is a
natural phenomenon which suffers greatly when space closes. So if you want
Community, just open space. It would also seem clear that working hard at
"creating community" is to a large extent a waste of time and energy.
Community is what we naturally are - we need only to remove the barriers and
constraint to its (community's) manifestation. And we do that by opening
space.
A long way around the barn to arrive at a simple point - which is - creating
highly elaborate community building processes is, from where I sit, not
likely to be very productive - especially since community seems to happen
pretty well all by itself - given the space. However, the critical
exploration and development of ways to leverage and amplify this natural
occurrence would seem to be right on the money. Could in fact be the real
Pot of Gold.
Harrison
Harrison Owen
7808 River Falls Drive
Potomac, Maryland 20845
Phone 301-365-2093
Open Space Training www.openspaceworld.com <http://www.openspaceworld.com/>
Open Space Institute www.openspaceworld.org
Personal website http://mywebpages.comcast.net/hhowen/index.htm
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