Courtenay, BC
I’m coming to the end of a Moleskine notebook I’ve had since March, and it’s almost filled up. I’m going through it harvesting a few things, and thought I might post a series of notes here. The journal began with a few notes that I made about the preliminary design of an Art of Hosting we ran for VIATT on Quadra Island. This particular Art of Hosting was called to train with 40 or so people who are helping us to build an Aboriginal child and familiy services system on Vancouver Island. It’s big work, undoing 120 of colonization and history and taking advantage of an historic opportunity to build a community-owned system that puts children at the centre of our work. Here’s what the notes say:
- Be the healing organization
- Establish everybody’s authority
- Healing patterns connecting heart to heart
- Host for community to become conscious
- Our work: healing the relationships between people that have arisen from the history of being tied to stakeholders
- This circle seems to recommit us to the work
- Putting our purpose at the centre, build a process to do this.
It’s fitting that I’m reflecting on this harvest tonight. Tonight we ran our third regional assembly here on Vancouver Island, inviting people from this area to share what is exciting them about this work. The purpose of the assemblies is to create champions for the process and to enlist people into a more intensive experience of community-based dialogue and deliberation by creating community circles. These circles will do the work of incorporating the community voice into the decisions and policy making of this new Authority we are creating to take over Aboriginal child and family services from the provincial government. We can’t do this without the community being involved and we’ve been quite taken by the response of Elders, youth and parents to our invitation to join us in creating this new system.
These notes remind me that much of the work I do has a healing component to it, that the work of opening hearts and supporting movement in Aboriginal organizations and communities is about healing – making whole – and sustaining connection and belonging. That makes the work I am doing complex and many-aspected, but when we get it right, like tonight for example when we ran a cafe that tapped open heartedness, it does so much more than move the organization forward in strategic ways. It makes things stronger.
Strengthening is a powerful and needed quality in development work, whether it is in organizations or communities. Strengthening commitment, heart, leadership, quality, results…it is a pattern of “better” that is embedded in the nature of powerful conversations and participatory leadership.
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.