ACTION: Mihaly Csikszentmihaly, the author of Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience has a new book out, which I am reading. The book is called Good Business: Leadership, flow and the making of meaning. The book is about the application of flow to performance in business settings and, of course, has much to teach us about acheiving that spirited state of activity in inviting organizations, the flow state.

Here's a quote to get us started:

"We are all born with a bundle of aptitudes, most of which we are not even aware of having. According to some, the highest level of happiness -- self-actualization -- is being able to express all the potentialities inherent in the organism. It is as if evolution has built a safety device in our nervous system that allows us to experience full happiness only when we are living at 100% -- when we are fully using the physical and mental equipment we have been given. This mechanism would ensure that after all ouor other needs were taken care of, we would still seek to use the full complement of our talents, thereby making it possible not just to preserve the status quo, but also to innovate and grow."

It's a compelling thought, that our desire to self-actualize and to fully live is the engine that drives evolution. One wonders then what crime we perpetrate on each other when we create organizations and work that actively supresses the full expression of a person's being? Sweatshop labour (or it's richer cousin, assembly line work) can therefore be seen as stealing huge amounts of life from people, and huge amounts of evolutionary energy from ur species. By enslaving others, to whatever extent, instead of inviting them to work, we actually compromise the ability of our species to withstand evolutionary challenges.



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STRUCTURE: McGee on grass roots knowledge management:

One critical feature of most first generation knowledge management efforts is that they were designed and implemented following the standard corporate approach of top down, centralized, resource planning and implementation. In an industrial environment you can maybe get away with planning processes that treat all resources as fungible. Then centralized processes might be adequate, although you would think that the failure of Soviet style centralized economies would give more corporations pause.

Knowledge work, on the other hand, depends on extracting maximum advantage out of the unique characteristics and experiences of each knowledge worker. Knowledge management, from this perspective, has to be a decentralized, grassroots, activity. If you accept that premise, the promise of weblogs in knowledge management becomes clearer. Weblogs operate on grassroots assumptions by design.

I have often thought that Open Space would be an ideal way to spawn a whole nest of weblogs in an organization, as each person leaves the meeting and enters the office to begin blogging the outcomes, next steps and results. With comments on each blog, people could begin linking ideas and knowledge and recreating the Open Space environment on a constant basis to share knowledge about whatever the organization is working on.

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STRUCTURE: Harrison Owen, the discoverer of Open Space Technology lists "diversity, complexity, passion and urgency" as the four conditions under which Open Space thrives. It's not hard to think of a a host of examples from one's own life where these four conditions are present. But right now in the world, there is a massive case study for looking at how self-organziation is meeting the challenge of these conditions: the SARS outbreak.

SARS, severe acute respitory syndrome, is spreading quickly through the world, and is having devastating impacts in certain areas including Hong Kong and Toronto. The news is saturated with daily coverage about the spread of the disease.

People are dying from SARS and that is causing agencies world wide to conduct research into the casues of the viral infection. The World Health Organization issued its first press release on SARS on March 12 warning of the outbreak of SARS in Vietnam, Hong Kong and Guangdong. Just over a month later, on April 16, WHO released another statement announcing that the cause of the syndrome had been found.

How did this happen so fast?

Certainly looking through the news on SARS research, it's hard to find anyone who is actually in control. There is no agency that is coordinating all of the information about the biology and epidemiology of the disease, although there are several agencies like the World Health Organization and the Centres for Disease Control who are acting as nodes in a network of collaboration to find a cure. As one report has noted:

"The people in this network have put aside profit and prestige to work together to find the cause of this new disease and to find new ways of fighting it,' said Klaus St?hr, WHO virologist and coordinator of the collaborative research network. 'In this globalised world, such collaboration is the only way forward in tackling emerging diseases."

And the tool of collaboration has been the biggest Open Space of all, one that is no stranger to viruses: the Internet..

"Dean Dobbert, an emergency-room doctor in a community hospital in Delaware and the medical director for the Kent County EMS system, agreed that Internet channels like mailing lists were scooping more established information sources online.

"SARS is different because of the Internet," Dobbert said. "The Internet has been great, especially hearing the posts from the doctor in Hong Kong right there on the front line, giving his observations. The other information on the CDC and WHO Web sites has for the most part just reflected what we heard already on the Internet."

When there are situations that are complex, with huge diversity, passion with conflict and urgency, nothing can beat self-organization to get things done. To find the cause of a world wide virus in only five weeks defies all traditional planning and organizing processes. Becasue the Internet provides a place for people to share their thoughts about the work they are doing, it facilitates the conditions for an Open Space response to SARS.

This story isn't over yet, but the lessons are unmistakeable. The best prescrption for seeking solutions to these kinds of problems is to get out of the way and let people with the passion, the means and the responsibility find each other and hammer out a solution.

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STRUCTURE to ACTION: Open Space welcomes Blue Oxen Associates to the world

"Blue Oxen Associates is a think tank devoted to studying and improving high-performance collaboration. We are particularly interested in studying knowledge processes -- how we share and acquire knowledge, and how we use tools to augment our abilities to inform, to learn, and to collaborate."

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ACTION: Eduardo Galeano on taking power

Some highlights from an interview in THe Progressive:

"I don't feel there is anyone who is voiceless. Everybody has something to say, something that deserves to be heard by others. So I never shared this attitude of becoming the voice of the voiceless. The problem is that just a few have the privilege of being heard. I'm not a martyr, not a hero.

We all have the right to know and to express ourselves, which is nowadays very difficult as long as we are obeying the orders of an invisible dictatorship. It is the dictatorship of the single word, the single image, the single tune, and perhaps it's more dangerous than other dictatorships because it acts on a world scale. It's an international structure of power which is imposing universal values that center on consumption and violence. It means that you are what you have. If you don't have, you are not. The right to be depends on your ability to buy things. You are defined by the things you have. It's like you are driven by your car. You are bought by your supermarket. You are seen by your TV screen. You are programmed by your computer. We have all become tools of our tools."

...

" I am always seeking a perhaps impossible but desirable communion between what I think and what I feel, which is also an intention to develop, to win, to conquer, to discover a language able to express at once emotions and ideas, what Colombians in the small towns on the Caribbean coast call the "feel-thinking language." It's a language which is able to reunite what has been divorced by dominant culture, which is always breaking in pieces everything it touches. You have a language for ideas and another language for emotions. The heart and the mind divorced. The public speech and the private life. History and present, also divorced."

...

"There is a popular movement in Mexico called El Barz?n. Nobody knows about it outside Mexico, but it's very important. It's a spontaneous movement born from the necessity to resist the pressures of Mexican banks. In the beginning, it was no more than a hundred or so people defending what they had--their homes, their businesses, their farms--against the voracious financial powers. But it grew and grew, and now there are more than one million persons. They have become so important that when a delegation from El Barz?n went to Washington, it was received by the vice president of the International Monetary Fund. I suppose this is such an important man he doesn't even speak to his wife, but he received El Barz?n.

A lot of movements are telling us hope is possible, tomorrow is not just another name for today."

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I had a great meeting over the weekend with Open Space colleagues Joelle Everett, Paul Everett, Father Brian Bainbridge, Penny Scott and Peggy Holman.

One of the things we were talking about was why Open Space hasn't seemed to catch on in the private sector like it has in the non-profit sector.

We decided that part of the problem was that we weren't speaking private sector language, so the first thing I did was mine the archives of this blog and create a paper out of the cases I had already noted. Email me or leave a comment below if you want a copy. It's a work in progress, so if you ask for it, be prepared to add to it!

At any rate, I thought I might turn my attention in this weblog to more and more business cases for Open Space Technology, so look for those. I'll seed that new direction with this entry:

ACTION: Double Digit Growth in No-Growth Times. From Fast Company, comes this compendium of strategy for creating growth in down times.

The current business climate is not very friendly, and yet there are several businesses that are succeeding by retooling the ways they are doing things. We're not talking about cutting costs and downsizing staff either. We're talking about "shifting from product innovation to demand innovation." in other words, seeing yourself as bigger than just the products you make. Some stories from the article:

• On demand innovation: "Think about your own product or service. Your customers spend time, effort, and money figuring out how to use your product, how to maintain it, finance it, store it, and dispose of it. Your product may have complex interactions with other products. It may serve more than one user, each with different needs. Those hassles and inefficiencies are all waiting to be improved, and they represent tremendous economic activity -- often 10 to 20 times greater than the product purchase itself."



• On hidden assets: "They turn size and experience into an advantage over newcomers. This is a welcome turn of events for big companies, where size and tradition have felt more like a burden than a benefit. Hidden assets have a second virtue: When leveraged, they tend to multiply. The more you use them, the more you have. Relationships become stronger. Information becomes richer and deeper. Networks become more extended. Growth begets more growth."
  


• On making growth everybody's business: "In short, growth is everybody's business. Don't hoard responsibility at the top. Instead, distribute the responsibility for growth and opportunities to grow as widely as possible. When you do, unexpected heroes emerge from your company's ranks."



• On working with your customer's problems: "Being steeped in customer needs means that virtually every new-growth initiative at Johnson [Controls] has at least some grounding in customer reality. And that's the real secret of growth: devising imaginative products and services for the future by mastering the current problems of your most important customers."
  

Open Space Technology as a methodology has immediate application in all of these scenarios. In the immediate short term, convening and Open Space meeting may be the fastest way to initiate these organizational changes. Imagine:

• Convening a think tank involving your most important customers and a wide assortment of your staff involved in production to improve customer use of your products by helping to master your customers biggest problems.



• Inviting the whole organization into the room with a company wide Open Space meeting, possibly linking through technology to leverage the hidden assets. This requires freeing people from their jobs for a couple of days to contribute new solutions through product ideas, relationship building or new network development.



• Using regular Open Space meetings to ask large slices of the corporation where they see the potential for growth, and for charging them with developing those areas, thus distributing responsibility for success.

Open Space can help organizations move more easily into "demand management" strategy and scenarios, whilst building long term commitment with the company to improving the chances for success.


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