The dance my wife Maureen and I have been talking about in our work
and in our lives (the same thing for us) for years now is the Dance
of Leader and Follower. And the Dance of Leader and Follower is Open
Space:
Look at what it means to be a leader today. And we mean leadership in
the sense that every one of us is called to be a leader and a
follower at various times in our day. When you look at leadership
over centuries, during the 2000 years before Christ, leadership was
characterized by physical domination. "If I conquer you, you follow
me." Then we moved into the last 2000 years up till today, which has
been largely leadership through intellectual domination. "I have the
information and I'll let you know when it's time for you to know."
It’s the foundation upon which our corporations, religious
institutions and governments have been based. The hierarchical
business models all stem from this thought process.
But, like it or not, we’re moving into a new model of leadership that
is calling for new foundations to support it. It's one based on what
we call a Wisdom Web. We’re currently living in an age of information
overload. If I want to continue to be a hierarchical leader, I’m
fooling myself to believe I can contain and control all the
information and decision-making that is required to run a business or
family today. I need to know when to lead and when to step back and
encourage others to lead.
Here’s an example. Imagine a time when most of us were in the third
or fourth grade. Our teacher asks us to write a paper on Martin
Luther King and we have three weeks to do it. So the first two and a
half weeks we spend time at the library with our friends looking
through the Readers' Guide to Periodical Literature, the card file
and the encyclopedia. The last few days we write the paper. When we
come back to class, chances are the teacher still had more
information on Martin Luther King than we did. And the old style
hierarchical model says that the teacher, at the head of the class,
is the most knowledgeable in the room. She'll tell us when it's time
for us to know.
Now switch your mind to a classroom of fourth graders today having
the same assignment. They go home the first afternoon and log onto
the internet. In five minutes they have 537,000 entries on Martin
Luther King and have to spend the next three weeks sifting through
information, rather than the gathering of information we had to do. A
very different skill and one we weren't really taught to think about.
When they come back to class, chances are at least one of those kids,
if not more, will have a piece of info on King that the teacher
doesn't have. In fact someone might have gotten the email address of
the great grandson of King, emailed him, and found out something no
one else has ever known. If the teacher goes with the old style model
of hierarchy, she will shut that student down for knowing more than
she does. When you operate under the principle that knowledge is
power, anything that threatens that power is unacceptable. Now it's
not that the teacher had bad intentions, it's just that the societal
model said she was to be in control to be considered a successful
teacher, and control was maintained through gate-keeping knowledge.
Today's teacher, operating on that old principle, will disengage a
student faster than you can imagine. We need to begin to let all
knowledge into the room, any room. And that means stepping back and
letting others take the lead, or stepping up to lead if we normally
follow.
We call this transition our world is in, The Dance of Leader and
Follower. If a man asks Maureen to dance, current rules say that he
leads and she follows. So that even though they've never met, they
can pretty much figure it out. Now imagine that those rules were
thrown out. This gentleman and Maureen get up to dance, but what
happens next? Well, she needs to stop a second and ask herself the
question, "What dances do I know? When should I be leading/
following?" He needs to ask himself the same thing. Then they need to
ask each other a series of questions so that they better know the
other. When the music starts, they now have a good chance that
they'll do OK. We call the music the culture of the organization or
the society. Put on any type of music, and as long as we're going
through those questions, we'll be all right, and it doesn't matter
what company we work for or who we’re in relationship with.
Because we have so much more knowledge at our fingertips, we can't
afford to attempt to gain power by controlling it. There's no longer
any way to do that. And leaders who haven't seen that yet are going
to eventually fall like the Berlin Wall.
And the only way for me to do The Dance of Leader and Follower is to
better know myself and where my strengths and passions lie, and then
to ask the pertinent questions to better know and understand others.
My knowledge is no longer contained in my head, but in the web of
people I connect with as well. That’s true power.
So that being said, we are in a time where it's beginning to be
crucial to better know others and ourselves. The State of Grace
Document (www.stateofgracedocument.com) is one way to do that. And
when we ask the questions and exchange the info before the dance
starts, we're more apt to be successful. If two people start dancing
without the info, step all over each others feet and get in an
argument, then stopping to exchange information at that point would
be a hell of a lot tougher.
Open Space is another way to create a platform through invitation,
passion and responsibility to better do the Dance of Leader and
Follower. In fact Open Space is the Dance of Leader and Follower in
motion. The dance between being and doing - on an individual and
group level simultaneously.
So, the dance takes us to more dancing - more doing and being in the
moment as passion arises, as invitation reaches out and joins us, as
meditation stills us, as internal knowing moves us to action, as
action leads us to reflection, as we know ourselves better, then
share ourselves, new passions emerge and the dance goes on...
Being both Leader and Follower, both Feminine and Masculine, Doing
and Being - is the paradox of our transition time.
What comes next is up to us.
with grace and love,
Zelle
Zelle Nelson
Engaging the Soul at Work/State of Grace Document/Know Place Like Home
www.stateofgracedocument.com
ze...@knowplacelikehome.com
work/home: 828.693.0802
mobile: 847.951.7030
Isle of Skye
2021 Greenville Hwy
Flat Rock, NC 28731
USA
On May 25, 2006, at 12:18 PM, Harrison Owen wrote:
I think it is fair to say that the female/male (feminine/masculine)
dance
has been something of a marathon. Occasionally it really flows, as
any good
dance/dancers might hope for. For myself, I remember those
occasions as
extraordinary moments. But then I love to dance. At other times
there are a
lot of feet that get stepped. And sometimes, one partner or the
other simply
gets swept off the floor and/or chooses to retire -- which makes
the dance
something of an oddity, not to say virtually impossible.
So if Open Space is a dance, where does that take us?
Harrison
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
OSLIST: To subscribe, unsubscribe, change your options, view the
archives Visit: www.listserv.boisestate.edu/archives/oslist.html
-----Original Message-----
From: OSLIST [mailto:osl...@listserv.boisestate.edu] On Behalf Of
Pat Black
Sent: Thursday, May 25, 2006 10:05 AM
To: osl...@listserv.boisestate.edu
Subject: The Da Vinci Connection -- Open Space and the Feminine
As some of my favorite books are being offered for reading I would
like
to add another. Layne Remonds's When The Woman Were Drummers has some
interesting insights about the change in balance. According to
Redmond
there was also a corresponding change in the relationship to the
drum's
purpose and who played it. There are many vase pictures of woman
holding round disk objects. Before woman had access to the acadamy
most
male archeologists discribed those disks as cakes. Gimbutus says they
are drums. Redmond is a frame drummer herself and I think, quite a
scholar on the history of the frame drum. I seem to remember some
issues between Moses and his sister Miriam before leaving Eygpt. I am
no Old Testament scholar but seem to remember that Miriam was a
drummer
and there were some power struggles between her and Moses. I think it
was the people that insisted Miriam be included. That would at least
date this struggle in the balance between the masculine and
feminine to
that time.
Pat Black
*
*
==========================================================
osl...@listserv.boisestate.edu
------------------------------
To subscribe, unsubscribe, change your options,
view the archives of osl...@listserv.boisestate.edu:
http://listserv.boisestate.edu/archives/oslist.html
To learn about OpenSpaceEmailLists and OSLIST FAQs:
http://www.openspaceworld.org/oslist
*
*
==========================================================
osl...@listserv.boisestate.edu
------------------------------
To subscribe, unsubscribe, change your options,
view the archives of osl...@listserv.boisestate.edu:
http://listserv.boisestate.edu/archives/oslist.html
To learn about OpenSpaceEmailLists and OSLIST FAQs:
http://www.openspaceworld.org/oslist
*
*
==========================================================
osl...@listserv.boisestate.edu
------------------------------
To subscribe, unsubscribe, change your options,
view the archives of osl...@listserv.boisestate.edu:
http://listserv.boisestate.edu/archives/oslist.html
To learn about OpenSpaceEmailLists and OSLIST FAQs:
http://www.openspaceworld.org/oslist
