My three year old son is a constant source of amusement and awe. Here are some of the questions he asked me today:
- How low is the earth?
- What part of the earth spins? – The outside, Finn – What part of the outside? Just the part we are standing on or the part that goes all the way to space?
- How did I get here? – a short form of the birds and the bees – Yes, I know that, but how did my aliveness get in?
Any answers you might have would be gratefully appreciated.
Open Space Technology works on passion bounded by responsibility. It’s about people finding what they want to do and assembling the resources around them to make that happen. It’s about support those people and their ideas with resources and openness. It really works, not just for meetings, but for organizational structures as well. It’s about redefining measurements of success and letting go of control.
Now a new book has come out about the practice of very Open Space-like principles at the Brazillian holding company Semco:
It’s our lack of formal structure, our willingness to let workers follow their interests and their instincts when choosing jobs or projects.
It’s our insistence that workers seek personal challenges and satisfaction before trying to meet the company’s goals.
It’s our commitment to encouraging employees to ramble through their day or week so that they will meander into new ideas and new business opportunities.
It’s our philosophy of embracing democracy and open communication, and inciting questions and dissent in the workplace.
On-the-job democracy isn’t just a lofty concept but a better, more profitable way to do things. We all demand democracy in every other aspect of our lives and culture. People are considered adults in their private lives, at the bank, at their children’s schools, with family and among friends–so why are they suddenly treated like adolescents at work? Why can’t workers be involved in choosing their own leaders? Why shouldn’t they manage themselves? Why can’t they speak up–challenge, question, share information openly?
What is it about this kind of model that makes people eschew it?
Thanks to Jeremy for the link.
Following up on my rant/question of yesterday. Today I met two doctors who I like alot, one of whom I count as a friend and one who is new to me and I was reminded again that what matters is creating conversations where parts of a system talk to one another. We can’t simply write off the whole system because there is wisdom within it that we need to draw us forward. There is also wisdom outside of it too, wisdom that really maters. In the bigger system, convening conversations, like what we did in Chicago matters a lot. In the body-as-system creating conversations with respect to one’s health means looking at everything holistically and inviting the healthy parts to talk to one another, be those cells, organs or caregivers.
Furthermore, Harry’s comments on yesterday’s post has me thinking about that edge I was trying to get at yesterday.
…I think she and her colleagues are members of a revolutionary, intellectual vanguard. The amount of influence they have for decency is miniscule in proportion to the ideological support they give, however inadvertently, to high powered snake oil salesmen and police state visionaries.
That’s a pretty direct statement. It’s why I am not a libertarian, willing to give over all of these areas to the kinds of forces that fill a vacuum with power and money. Instead, I want to enable communities and individuals to be able to care foir themselves and each other in a way that supports the capacity required to do that. I’m trying to be both optimistic, supportive and on guard against the kinds of people that Harry describes as “snake oil salesmen and police state visionaries.”
I feel like I’m rambling on here…something is niggling away in my brain, and I’m looking for words, ideas and metaphors to describe it.
I have been engaging with Lenore Ealy since the Giving Conference in Chicago. She turned me on to Richard Cornuelle’s work which seems prescient in many ways. This paper, De-Nationalizing Community (.pdf) is a short but very interesting read. It weaves together anarchist and libertarian perspectives arguing that the idea of community has been appropriated by government. The paper generated a really interesting spark of mutual interest between Lenore and I. We come from very different political poles and through our conversations I have been losing my grip on political spectrums, compasses and other typologies, which can only be a good thing.
So in the context of this slippage I have been thinking a lot about the role that government plays in our lives. I wouldn’t say I’m a libertarian and I think there is a need for government to provide services to citizens. But the anarchist in me wants to attach a warning to those services, like the warnings on cigarette packages: use at your own risk.
I don’t trust corporations to provide services either, and I’m not advocating privatisation of community resources. That’s what appeals to me about Cornuelle’s paper. It’s not a perfect solution but it is thought provoking.
I already unschool my kids, and I’ve pretty well unjobbed myself. I was thinking of finding a new doctor (my former GPO has gone into a community based ob-gyn practice…yay to her!) but recent interactions with the medical system has convinced me to actually avoid getting an MD and, unless there are dire emergency circumstances, not going anywhere near a hospital. I have a good homeopath, and I’m active and eat reasonably well. If I can at all avoid it, I’d rather spare myself exposure to iatrogenesis.
In general I think that government services are the worst possible option for people who are really in need. I don’t know why this is, as most of the people who work in government are generally there because at some level they care in a way that drives them to join the public service. But as a whole, it’s as if some dark-side of emergence takes over when government goes to offer a service. Whether it is welfare, education, child protection, health care or infrastructure, we tend to receive services which are offered on a shoestring budget by overworked people with little time for personal contact. If you need those services, it’s great that they are there, but god forbid you should ever need them.
In general efforts at reforming public services are very long and drawn out affairs which have very little impact for the amount of energy they consume. In many cases it is easier to actually do it yourself, be that homeschooling children, constructing community housing or starting community-based child welfare agencies.
Still, I feel like government needs to provide services to those in the direst need. And I feel especially that corporations and profit making ventures have very little place in public services. The question is how can we best use collective resources (such as tax dollars) to support the best possible sets of services and community initiative to ensure that no one falls through the cracks without creating a situation where people come to depend on government to the point where individual and collective volition evaporates.
Thoughts?
[tags]libertarianism, anarchism, richard cornuelle[/tags]
Elisabeth Kubler-Ross
Through Euan, I found out that Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, the author of On Death and Dying, herself died on Wednesday.
Her work on the grief cycle especially has been very influential in my own life in dealing with people, organizations and communities undergoing deep change. But her legacy, as David Weinberger points out, may be that she gave North American culture a language for talk about death and being with dying people.