As part of the festivities in Moscow, Raffi and his colleagues at
Intertraining are going to produce some sort of a publication on Open Space,
and he asked me to write a short piece. The muse settled on my shoulder and
I produced the following (see below). It came out a little more tongue in
cheek than I might have intended, but you really can't argue with The Muse
-- and besides Raffi seemed to be "a-mused" -- so I guess it is OK. Then it
occurred to me that some of you might have some additional comments which
Raffi and friends might find useful (or not). Ho
*******************************
The Mystery of Open Space
Harrison Owen
Open Space Technology will reach the age of maturity this summer,
2006. Twenty one years ago, the first Open Space took place in Monterey,
California involving some 85 people. Since then Open Space has been used in
excess of 60,000 times, in 120 countries, involving millions of people.
Group size has ranged from 5 to over 2000 people, and the precipitating
issues have included everything from local environmental planning to the
redesign of the manufacturing process of a major component of Boeing
aircraft.
By any reasonable standard Open Space Technology should be
considered an old, tested, and reliable approach. And yet to listen to
multiple conversations on the subject, you would think that Open Space is
the newest, riskiest, most avant guard way of doing business. Something is
definitely strange!
People speak of doing an Open Space with a sense of mystery and
wonder usually associated with walking on the moon, raising the dead, or
eliminating gravity, and yet when something has been around for so long,
having appeared in virtually every country on the planet with millions of
people the real mystery is Why is Open Space a mystery?
Like all really good mysteries, the clues for solution lie right
there in plain sight, which only deepens the sense of mystery! We stumble
over them every day, and except for the fact that they dont have large
signs indicating their presence, they simply couldnt be any more obvious.
But somehow we never notice, or perhaps never choose to notice. As
everybody knows, the best way to really hide something is to make it so
obvious as to be unremarkable. When something becomes totally familiar, you
simply dont notice it any more. It just becomes part of the scene.
But you might ask How could this possibly be true with Open
Space Technology? Even the name sounds a little weird, and what supposedly
happens when you use it defies imagination. Everybody knows that you cant
take a group of people, let alone a group of several thousand people, and
bring them to a point of concerted, productive action in something like 15
minutes. And you certainly couldnt do all that with out lengthy agenda
preparation, prior training for the group, and massive facilitation. Just
couldnt happen!
But it does. More than that, it has happened thousands of times.
Even worse, it continues to happen every time a group of people are invited
to gather in a circle around a major issue of common concern, create a
bulletin board displaying their sub-issues, and open a market place to
negotiate time and place of meeting. That done, they simply go to work. No
fuss, no bother, no organizing committee, no facilitators nothing but
people doing what they care to do relative to a subject of genuine concern.
Works every time!
So what is the clue? Self-organization! If we are to believe the
growing consensus of the Scientific Community, the power of
self-organization has been behind the emergence of the cosmos in all of its
bits and pieces, from the moment of the Big Bang until this present instant.
Not just some of it, not just in distant times and places, but everything
including you and me. Given certain very simple pre-conditions order
happens, all by itself. Or as one of the major figures in the field, Stuart
Kauffman says, Order for Free. Nobody did it, not an executive committee
or Boss in sight.
Admittedly, it is a long way from the Big Bang to the nearest Open
Space event 13.7 billion years and quadrillions of miles to be exact but
if it just happened that we had replicated the initiating pre-conditions of
self-organization in every Open Space, what occurs next is totally
predictable. Indeed the mystery would arise should it not happen! Can I
prove this? No but when you do something 60,000 times and it always seems
to work out the same way that would be a reasonable indication that a common
force was operative in all situations. You could call that
self-organization or witchcraft but self-organization works for me.
And now we come to the really shocking part. One might even say
scandalous! Just suppose that the power of self-organization really was
behind the common experience in Open Space. One might then suspect that
self-organization is not some zany cosmic quirk, but an every day reality in
those funny things we call businesses, governments, and communities!
Heresy! Everybody knows that we (whoever we are) did the
organizing. And we also know that somebody is in charge in CONTROL! That
is what all the books tell us. We learned it in school. And if we didnt
learn the lesson in our youth, it is repeated on a daily basis. Obey the
Boss who has everything under control!!
And if all that is not true, we are seriously in trouble. Just think
about all the professors of management whose stock in trade is teaching a
1000 Ways to Keep Control. They could lose their tenure. Even worse for all
those managers whose jobs depend of Being in Charge. And things get pretty
bad for us too. Because if nobody is in charge, maybe we all are? When
things go wrong it is so nice to be able to blame them and for sure we are
not responsible.
Could it be that all of this is just a delusion? Not unlike the
Emperors Clothes? Perish the thought. We really dont want to go there. As
for Open Space Technology, it is much better just to leave it an unsolved
mystery. If we ever took it seriously, we could be in a world of pain.
Harrison Owen
7808 River Falls Drive
Potomac, Maryland 20854
Phone 301-365-2093
Skype hhowen
Open Space Training www.openspaceworld.com
Open Space Institute www.openspaceworld.org
Personal website www.ho-image.com
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