One session in Camden last week that really grabbed my interest was hosted by my dear friend and colleague Father Brian Bainbridge from Australia. Brian is another remarkable man, generous, dry in his humour and open hearted. He has been working on a little book for a while about brining Open Space to parish life, which documents his stories of working with the parishoners of St. Scholastica’s in Melbourne. In a little over two years, Brian has been exploring the transformation that comes about from shifting from the managerial worldview to the open space worldview. What he has found is a renewal in the life of the parish, and in the spiritual life of the parishioners. What interests me about this transformation is how it relates to the spiritual teachings that lie at the heart of the parish. In other words, is an Open Space worldview compatible with Christian teachings?
Brian was good enough to host a session on this topic which was attended by folks from many faith traditions. For me, it became very clear that Open Space invites us as individuals to connect with the deeper sources of creation in our world. Almost all major religions teach both a path for individual spiritual practice and a path for collective spiritual community building. Whether you are a Christian, a Buddhist, Baha’i, Jew, Taoist, Muslim, Hindu or you practice a traditional spirituality, there are precepts for the life of spiritual communities that, I think, invite us to notice the source of creative energy as it flows between us. Living in community is a spiritual practice. Open Space, it seems to me, offers us a chance to connect with one another in a deeper way by connecting with the source of creativity in the universe. We call this by many names. Religious people migt call it Spirit, secular folks will see it as self-organization, Taoists call it the Tao. Whatever it is named, it is possible to experience it, and Open Space seems to create the conditions for that experience. This explains to me why many people report a much deeper experience in Open Space than in many other process I work with.
This theme surfaced at the Art of Hosting workshop I took part in later in the week in Indiana, where there was a large contingent of participants who were exploring the roots of their leadership practice and discovering that at a certain point they converged with their spiritual paths as well. This continues to be interesting for me, and I wonder what your experience of leadership, Open Space in particular and spirituality is?
In the OSLIST discussion on circles and presence, I added some thoughts, which I thought I’d republish here…
My experience of the circle is first of all, that there has never been a group I have worked with – not business people, airplane engineers, entrepreneurs, government officials, community members – that hasn’t been just fine in a circle. No one has ever asked me not to set the room up a different way, although plenty of people have expressed their doubts that any of it would work.
I’ve also done OST in other formats as well, like lecture halls, semi circles and squares, and they seem to work fine, although it’s definitely ME that is more uncomfortable in those settings. I also think things don’t flow very well in general. It’s harder for people to get to the centre to put their issues up and harder to move around when there is a different geometry.
Still, I think sometimes facilitators might make too big a deal of the circle. We all know why it works, and that’s why we use it – as Harrison and others have said. But to discuss circle energetics, or ancient forms of human communication in the opening of an open space event can be distracting. But it isn’t the circle that is distracting, it’s how the facilitator shows up.
Presence is everything I think in this work. It’s really all we have to offer the group once the logistics are taken care of. We can show up and drone on and on about the topic and the energy saps. We can be bored and the group will get bored too. We can show up too excited and the group will eye us as a nervous puppy. Presence is many things, but at a core level it’s about rapport with the group and the topic. My own presence in open space tends to focus very clearly on the work at hand. I don’t tend to fill the group in on what’s “under the hood” of open space. Most of us don’t need to know how a car works in order to use it. How we hold space I think is what gives it the “granola” flavour. Or not.
Probably most of us know that open space “works” without a circle. The point is that, for all the disappearing the facilitator does, I think it really matters how we DO participate for the small amount of time we are before the group. Present AND invisible. I would say that the quality of our presence even transcends the geometry: I have seen terrible facilitators in a circle make a hash of open space. The good news is that, with a good invitation, the momentum of the group is nearly always able to overcome anything we put in their way.
For more on this ineffable quality, download The Tao of Holding Space.
[tags] openspacetech[/tags]
Harrison Owen muses on circles, presence and Open Space on the OSLIST:
As I have listened to this conversation (a very rich one!) random thoughts came to mind – which may actually fit together? The first one went something like this. We speak, understandably, about “doing an Open Space” – but I suspect that may box us into a corner we need not be stuck in. “Doing and Open Space” implies that we are following a certain set of prescribed procedures, after all Open Space Technology is a method. This is true, but it may also hide a larger truth, I think. We don’t do an Open Space – we are an open space in which we and our fellows find meaning and purpose, or not. For some of us that space may be very constricted, and those lives tend to look pretty much the same way – narrow and locked into set patterns and expectations, which may even become comfortable, like old shoes. Others seem to occupy a much more commodious space in which change and possibility are constant companions and experiencing that novelty is a real high. All of us have the potential to expand our space, or maybe more accurately, to recognize and acknowledge the larger possibilities which could be ours. I think what happens in an Open Space event is that we are invited to consider those possibilities and make them our own, if we so choose. I once wrote a book, “Expanding our Now” (Berrett-Koehler) which attempted to make precisely this point. So we might more fruitfully understand that all of life is open space and an Open Space gathering is simply a moment in time/space when we are encouraged to go exploring. So it is not so much about “Doing an Open Space” as about being fully and intentionally present in the infinity of life space available – at least so far as we are able. Corollary to this would be that the Open Space event is not something strange, unique and different – it is just life. All of life is open space. We must choose whether that space is expansive or constricted for us.
Then I thought of a song I have always enjoyed, “All of Life’s a Circle,” sung by a favorite whose name has disappeared in a senior moment. You might think of this as variations on a theme. It is true that we may square the circle, bisect the circle (semi-circle), even go around in circles – those are choices which may be quite appropriate under certain circumstances. But that does not change the fundamental reality that all of life is a circle. A circle of friends, a circle of peers and colleagues, a circle of power and influence, a circle of life and death. We may attempt to reduce life to straight lines (“A career path”), sharp angles and squared intersections (the standard PERT chart and project management schema) or even get life in a box, a nice, neat rectilinear box. But at the end of the day, and indeed on every day, life will go its own way as a circle, the transformation of circles, the inter-connection and overlapping of circles, all contained in a larger circle.
Presence is our way of being in the great circle(s) of life. This may be a grudging presence, a distracted presence, a frantic presence, or something approaching a full, intentional, appreciative presence in which the infinite possibilities (good and bad) of life are acknowledged and engaged. To a certain extent the nature of our presence is a matter of choice, but no matter the choices made or the constraints encountered there is always the possibility of an expanded presence in the great open circle of life. I think.
And Open Space Technology? For me every Open Space gathering becomes an opportunity to practice our presence, should we choose to do so. On the surface it will appear that important issues are raised, problems solved, plans made, organization grown, products designed. All important, and for most participants probably sufficient to meet expectations, or not. But beneath (above?) it all I experience a practice of presence – becoming more fully engaged with our selves, our fellows, and our world. Just living more intentionally in the great open circle of life. Or something.
[tags]openspacetech, harrison owen, presence[/tags]
Nick Smith has a nice post on common vision and team building in which he offers a few useful approaches for building common bonds, prefaced by this:
I’ve never been comfortable with the word ’empowerment’. It’s speak to me of something manipulative and I’ve never found that motivation works that way. I tend to agree with what Henry Miller said, “The only way in which anyone can lead us is to restore to us the belief in our own guidance.”
I like that.
On the OSLIST, Doug wrote:
Chris and all–
Fields work…
Hosting…
living in open space…
You seem to have these evocative phrases swimming about you, Chris. Would you be so kind as to wax a little more poetic about them, put some more meat on the bones? They are, I think, getting to the heart of the question that started this thread….
The thread was about whether or not the facilitator can take an active role in an Open Space meeting, and what or why not. It has been a good thread. I responded to Doug this way:
Well Doug, these phrases are sort of short descriptions of the work I do, and there is a strange thing about them. The more I try to define them, to less important they seem. To first phrase of the Tao te Ching is something like, “The eternal Tao is the Tao that cannot be named.” So if you can accept that anything I am going to say on these matters is actually NOT the practice of these concepts, and that defining them somehow constrains what they really mean, then we can proceed.
In terms of “fields work”, let me say this. I don’t know much about this subject so I describe it more as experience. I’m willing to be that most have us have had the experience of arriving at a venue for a gathering before everyone else, scoping the place out, senseing what it feels like and imagining how our event will go. Then we facilitate an open space meeting and, being the last ones to leave we notice that the physical feeling of the space is different. I wonder why this is?
I think that it has something to do with the quality of our personal experiences in these spaces. When we are engaged in an amazing collective experience, it creates some deep change, even to the point where a room “feels” different. We participate in these kinds of collective activities all the time, but to do so consciously – not in a controlling way, just in a more aware way – seems to be the essence of working in a field. It is then we become aware of things like the impact of our presence on the field (Lisa’s awareness of her power in a group) and we can do things with that presence. The essence of doing the right thing in Open Space with that presence is of course, not doing anything at all, or rather to use the taoist concept, non-doing. That is we make a conscious choice about what we choose not to do and in doing so, we help support a field that supports emergence, self-organization and real empowerment. Field working in this respect is dependant I think on our ability to work on ourselves first, hence when we adaopt as a practice, living in open space, it changes the way we see every field of human endeavour, and it does bring us much more in line with the essentials of running an open sapce meeting.
You ask about hosting as well. I’ve been working for a few years now within the community of practice gathered under the name “Art of Hosting” and, like Open Space, I can’t describe what it is very well. I think my book, The Tao of Holding Space (which you can have for free by downloading it from http://www.chriscorrigan.com/wiki/pmwiki.php?n=Main.Papers) is my attempt to describe hosting from the perspective of “holding space.” Hosting has to do with all of the capacities we use when we engage with clients around an open space. Some of these might include:
- Seeing and sensing patterns in the organization that help to find “accupuncture points” for change,
- Taking a courageous stand for clarity.
- Encouraging others who are finding their own leadership.
- Offering teaching where it is of benefit and having the humility to be learners in th every next moment. Being “TeacherLearners.”
- Trusting in the people and holding helpful beliefs about the potential of the people.
- Being prepared to be surprised, and delightedly hosting that surprise like a long lost friend coming to pay a visit.
These practices (among many others and we all have our own) are hosting, and if we extend these into the way we live our lives, it becomes very much a case of living in open space. For me, the four principles and the one law of opens spce (plus my friend Brian Bainbridge’s “Be prepared to be be surprised” and “It’s all good :-)”) are actually very useful principles for life. I really do consciously try to live my life this way, and in doing so, I have stumbled upon the idea of fields, hosting and so on. It has made me no longer a facilitator per se but more of what John Abbe and others call “a process artist,” living as an artist, trying to find the art in everything about process, including how I ride the bus and step into a venue to open space. Our family lives in open space: for example, our children do not go to school, instead they practice – consciously and fully – the principles which my partner and I share with our clients. They work with mentors aong the lines of “whoever comes…” They explore the world along the lines of “whatever happens…” and they are not constrained by artificial timeframes on things like learning to read and write, creativity or learning.
If we are in the world saying to clients that “If you are not learning and contributing, go somewhere where you can” why would we not practice that in our family and life? It is my ten year old daughter’s favourite principle for her life – last week she wrote it out on a piece of paper and taped it to the dining room wall.
Living in Open Space is a constant life practice. It is about living in alignment with an Open Space worldview. It helps support “that feeling” we get from a good open space meeting, and bringing it into other parts of our lives.
It seems to me that when we live deeply out of that place, the role of facilitator and participant seems somehow transcended, so that, while I appreciate the distinction in some settings, and I honour it quite firmly, I find that it is a distinction that in many other settings doesn’t necessarily serve. Living in open space means living in that flow, discerning the right time for the right view and being open to whatever happens as a result.
[tags]openspacetech[\tags]