Paul,
Thanks again for your series of posts.
In the book THE CULTURE GAME there is a chapter "Be Punctual"
There is also a chapter, "Open The Space", which of course includes the
principle "Whenever it starts is the right time."
Oversimplifying here, I think most times, most groups in a meeting are
doing either dialogue, or deciding, or are in some kind of transition
from one to the other, along a gradient.
I currently believe:
* In deciding-mode, punctuality can (and often must) be tightened up.
* In dialogue-mode, punctuality usually needs to be relaxed to allow
(much) more emergence.
* The property of punctuality is a configurable design property. With
it we can assign a range of say, 1 to 10 where 1 is "totally loose"
and 10 is "totally strict."
* How punctuality is configured all depends on the design goals for
the experience under consideration.
On 10/30/13 6:55 AM, paul levy wrote:
Sharing one more of three. Your comments and insights most welcome...
warm wishes
Paul Levy
We can become trapped by all kinds of dogma in our lives. One of them
is start times. Businesses clock people in and out and there are
sanctions for poor timekeeping. We grow up with school timetables and
many of us probably remember being told off or even punished for being
late to class.
In music, if the orchestra doesn't start together, the music will not
sound pleasant! Yet, in purely improvised jazz, anyone can start. We
join in as and when.
In open space, we are encouraged not to get hung up over time. When it
starts is when it is meant to start. The dogma of starting on time is
a dogma of forcing. It becomes another imposed structure. It might
turn out we all do turn up for a session bang on time and start bang
on time as well. Or it might be that some pre-start chit-chat turns
out to be just the buzz needed for us to start a little later.
The start time of an open space session is not set and imposed. The
start time in the agenda is an intention at the time the session is
offered. "I'd like to offer a session on Time Management in the Red
Room at 11am. The time set is experienced as true at the time it is
set. And, already the world has changed; we have moved on, the
narrative may shift significantly. One session may over-run and the
follow-on session may wait for those people, or may not. The right
time emerges out of the need of the moment.
This can and does free us up. It offers the chance to be lazily late,
or to simply allow the time to start to emerge as needed by the
situation. What stops this principle descending into a lazily, chaotic
programme? According to Jack Martin Leith, one of the few people who
has ventured to critique open space, it all comes down to awareness.
At an open space event there is a collective responsibility to be
aware of the reason the Open Space event was created and also of the
other people attending: "I believe that each participant should
maintain awareness of these outcomes throughout the conference. This
awareness should extend to the conscious use of time and space, such
as starting meetings on time (because people are aware that time is
limited) and not letting them overrun (because they are aware that
other people need the space)." (Reference, with case examples, here -
http://www.jackmartinleith.com/more-effective-ost-and-rtsc/)
Start time should never be a rule; it is more of an impulse. It's
often remarkable how, on reflection, allowing the start time to "show
itself", is often viewed afterwards as just the right time to start.
This doesn't come easy to those addicted to structure, those who need
to know what lies up ahead in the fixed plan. It comes easier to those
who like to go with the flow, who like to improviser, and also those
who are lazy and also those who are relaxed. Different cultures treat
start times differently and open space conferences that involve a
meeting of different cultures can really show these different views
and behaviours in action.
"Whenever it starts is the right time" isn't an invitation to be lazy
with time, nor to never agree a start time and stick to it. It is an
invitation to view start times as emergent.
A group or community, in open space, can often sense together when
something needs to start. And that isn't always the time stated in the
programme.
When we live by the principle "whenever it starts is the right time"
in open space, we give permission to others to flow in their own way.
We give them space to be, and in doing that, we also give the
community space to be an, as a result, space for possibility opens
more easily. There's another side to this coin: When a group meets in
a circle (physical or symbolic) or a conversation or to do work
together, a collective responsibility can form. The group becomes an
organism, even as it is made up for individuals. The group can find,
often without words, the right time to start. One person can take the
needed in-breath, and then we all start to sing. Sometimes we all
breath together. This is captured beautiful in the words of
philosopher, Rudolf Steiner:
"A healthy social life is found only, when in the mirror of each soul
the whole community finds its reflection, and when in the whole
community the strength of each one is living."
So, the right time to start can be born from one person's impulse,
from the nod between two people, or even from the synchronicity of the
whole group.
There's a lovely paradox here that many open space facilitators have
failed to understand. Some people hold firmly to a start time and
attempt to uphold it. They create a dogma out of the start time. And
this is also fine. If an individual manages to persuade or even cajole
an entire room into starting at a fixed time, then this is the right
time to start, if the people in the room follow that lead. Along the
line of "it starts when it starts" and "it starts in exactly three an
a half minutes" are all kinds of people, will impulses and skills of
assertiveness. To impose the principle as a rule that excludes time
fixedness is as bad as excluding the principle itself. So some
sessions will start just as planed earlier in the day, down to the
last second and others won't. And both are perfectly lovely.
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