Received my invitation today for the 23rd International Symposium on Organizational Transformation (OT23). This year, friends Susan Kerr and Sheila Isakson among other are hosting the gathering in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, USA. This year’s theme is “Welcoming Spirit”:
We invite conversations at all levels of experience from persons who have heard about Open Space but not had an opportunity to participate to persons who have been practicing Open Space since Harrison Owen introduced it in the early 1980�s. These meetings are designed to be flexible and are intended for anyone who wishes to begin or continue learning about the practice of Open Space, which is an essential part of any transformation. Please note that this is not a training event. You will be responsible for your own learning and many opportunities will be provided for you to �Welcome Spirit� and to co-create events within this theme. During our days together, raise questions about our theme: What does �Welcoming Spirit� mean to you? Or raise questions about how Open Space is used to improve meetings, identify issues or opportunities for implementing Open Space to co-create new ways to be in organizations, or share your stories and insights about your own life and work experiences.
If you want to go, email Sheila at isakson@juno.com.
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Ten items of linkage focusing on conversation, transformative leadership, presencing and creativity:
- Hugh McLeod’s beautiful treatise on how to be creative.
- The conversations guide from the Christian Science Monitor called Across the Red-Blue Divide. Contains a series of articles and a public conversations guide to help people listen to one another.
- A one page guide for facilitating conversations across the political divide, from the Public Conversations Project. Both of the above courtesy of Happenings
- Fieldnotes: the newsletter of the Shambhala Institute. If you can afford it, this year’s Shambhala Authentic Leadership Summer Program will be very worthwhile, featuring Harrison Owen, Toke Moeller, Adam Kahane, Art Kleiner and Margaret Wheatley among others.
- The Global Leadership Initiative putting Otto Sharmer’s Theory of the U into practice. For more on that, see the site for Presence
- Bringing the mind of reflection into Action (.pdf). An interview with Peter Senge from his workshop at the Shambhala Institute in 2003. Via Empowerment Illustrated.
- Denationalizing Community. A paper by Richard Cornuelle arguing that the welfare state appropriated community and robbed citizens of the ability to take leadership in their own spaces.
- Peter Drucker on Making Decisions. Best practices from research. Managers that were considered effective said “we” rather than “I.”
- Presencing: Learning from the future as it emerges by C. Otto Scharmer: “This paper looks at the impact of the emerging new business environments � often referred to as the “new economy” � on the basic concepts of organizational learning and change … In order to do well in the emerging new business environments, organizations and their leaders have to develop a new cognitive capability, the capability for sensing and seizing emerging business opportunities … (They) can develop this capability by engaging in a different kind of learning cycle, one that allows them to learn from the future as it emerges, rather than from reflecting on past experiences.” Figures, tools and an extensive bibliography are included.
- Bill Torbert’s page on Action Inquiry, with many links and interesting articles. Via Empowerment Illustrated.
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Today Dave Pollard reprints a recent speech by Bill Moyers in which he implores the world to use its heart to see what is unfolding around us. Moyers ends the speech thusly:
On the heath Lear asks Gloucester: ‘How do you see the world?” And Gloucester, who is blind, answers: “I see it feelingly.'”I see it feelingly.The news is not good these days. I can tell you, though, that as a journalist, I know the news is never the end of the story. The news can be the truth that sets us free – not only to feel but to fight for the future we want. And the will to fight is the antidote to despair, the cure for cynicism, and the answer to those faces looking back at me from those photographs on my desk. What we need to match the science of human health is what the ancient Israelites called ‘hocma’ – the science of the heart…the capacity to see, to feel, and then to act as if the future depended on you.
This capacity to see from the heart lies at the core of what it means to sense the emerging future. And seeing from the heart means sensing the patterns of our emergent future in the grains of sand that are our present, right now, right here.
Johnnie Moore put it nicely yesterday when he asked “is your future in your present?”
In talking with Sonny Diabo last week, I learned that recovering this capacity to see may well be the one emerging Aboriginal leadership capacity that distinguishes 21st century leaders from those who have gone before. The utter domination of scientific materialism (along with the empirical measurement craze of the last couple of centuries) has relegated this ancient skill to the bargain basement bin of divination and idealism. The result has been a civilization where we shut off our human responses to the world and trust our senses only if they are confirmed by some mediated third party
Seeing the future in the present consists of two parts I think. It first means “seeing feelingly” or apprehending the truth of the world as it appears in front of us. All of the forces and the obstacles and the obfuscations that stand between our eyes and what is really happening. Seeing with the heart is the only way through this mess, to truly sense what is upon us.
Second, the capacity for seeing involves what Sonny describes as “getting my foot in the door.” In other words, there is a subtle ability to discern opportunity in all of the mess of the world. Sonny’s work these days consists of being and Elder to several processes across Canada that are purporting to make a difference for First Nations people. Among his two pet projects are Aboriginal Head Start, and long term care. He decided to throw his commitment into these projects because being born and dying are our deepest connections with the spirit world and the experiences of the first and last years of life are the most important for defining what it means to be Aboriginal. He sees this clearly, and sees the processes he is working on like doors that are opened a crack. He sees those cracks as potential, which he can help realize by supporting them as an Elder. And for him, once he has sensed this “”rightness” he sticks his foot in the door and does not let it go. For to simply witness these opportunities coming and going is not his game. He is there to extract the most he can for Aboriginal people. There is no decision to be made – he simply stays in the knowledge and belief that holding space and keeping it open allows the potential he sees to become manifest for everyone.
At the Art of Hosting workshop last week, my dear friend Toke Paludan Moller had a realization that he shared with us. It is that at every moment we are together as humans, collaborating, creating and enjoying ourselves, we are embodying something of the future we want to see. In our very act of being with one another, we are saying “this is how it should be.” Toke asked the question “what if the way we are together is the future?”
Questions like that force the eyes and heart open to seeing the world feelingly, in a way that allows us to see where we are and to seize the future contained in the Now, to seed it and grow it.
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In Presence, one of the core pieces of clarifying purpose and moving to action is basing your work in deep seeing and sensing skills. I have been experimenting with various strategies to deepen seeing and find the core truths that form powerful purposes and visions. This is the first of a few posts on this topic. It recapitulates a story I posted last week to the OSLIST about working in Open Space with a client and friend of mine, and sometime commenter on this blog.
Last week Dave facilitated his first open space (he did great) and this gave us an opportunity to talk deeply about what it was like to manage from a position of “holding space.” We did a little exercise together once the groups were meeting. I asked him to look very hard at what he was seeing in the room and tell me what he saw. I wrote down the list as he noticed things: the groups are all engaged, there is lots of space in the room and only some of it is being used, there is activity at the edges and emptiness in the middle, people are using technology that is appropriate to the task and so on.
I asked him to step outside the room and tell me what he saw. From outside he said that it was hard to tell what was going on. When he got right inside, sitting in with a group, he was interested in how engaged they were and how there didn’t seem to be a world outside of the conversation.
I asked him how he felt and he talked about the struggle with control he was having as a facilitator, identifying where it hurt, where his buttons were being pushed. He noticed that his role was very different from the one he occupies at work where he is supposed to be in charge of the process. Most profoundly he noticed that, although
his organization back home was known as “an authority” the actual authority in the room lay with the participants.
At the end of this 30 minute exercise in seeing and sensing, I gave him the list of the 40 or so things he had noticed and wrote at the top “A vision for my organization in ten years.” He immediately recognized that what we were seeing in this small 3 hour OST event was exactly the kind of organization he wanted to being working towards. He recognized his role in the vision too, and realized that the emotions he was feeling holding space were those he was blocking by exerting a little more control at work. We talked about the list a little more and discovered some questions that we could ask his stakeholders back home, questions that would propel the system forward to an evolving, emergent Open Space.
I’m beginning to use this technique to coach sponsors and clients into noticing what is truly working in the system around them. By helping to guide their experience of really seeing an OST event, questions arise that propel thinking towards manifesting the feel and spirit of the event in the institutional setting later on.
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With thanks to new friends met through the Art of Hosting this week:
With regard to external factors, I don’t envision any other single factor like friendship with admirable people as doing so much for a monk in training, who has not attained the heart’s goal but remains intent on the unsurpassed safety from bondage. A monk who is a friend with admirable people abandons what is unskillful and develops what is skillful.
From the Itivuttaka collection of Pali suttas.