Having a weblog in addition to having a regular website means that there are two front doors to my online home. There have been a lot of searches here lately for facilitation and Open Space resources, so I thought I would highlight the collections that I maintain through two pages here.
I hope you find these useful. Let me know how they are for you.
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Thoreau, from May 27, 1851:
I saw an organ-grinder this morning before a rich man’s house, thrilling the street with harmony, loosening the very paving stones and tearing the routine of life to rags and tatters, when the lady of the house shoved up a window and in a semiphilanthropic tone inquired if he wanted anything to eat. But he, very properly it seemed to me, kept on grinding and paid no attention to her question, feeding her ears with melody unasked for. So the world shoves up its window and interrogates the poet, and sets him to gauging ale casks in return. It seemed to me that the music suggested that the recompense should be as fine as the gift. It would be much nobler to enjoy the music, though you paid no money for it, than to presume always a beggarly relation. It is after all, perhaps, the best instrumental music that we have.
A complex quote, for as you will hear below, it is not clear which is the kinder gift.
mp3: Chiappa Barrel Organ – Daisy Bell and Oh Mr. Porter
[tags]Thoreau, barrel+organ[/tags]
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One of the most incredible application of Open Space Technology I have ever seen was the Giving Conference that was sponsored by Phil Cubeta and convened and facilitated by Michael Herman with an assist from me, It started something that has flowed out all over the place, and the story has been retold in many places, most recently on Phil’s blog The World We Want
Phil challenged me, at his other blog Wealth Bondage to put together a small manifesto on the world I want. As it relates to philanthropy, open space and democracy, here are a few thoughts:
- Spurred on by a number of ideas, books and thoughts, we can convene local conversations about giving. These conversations need to invite a huge diversity of people, from many different political, economic, social and cultural types to engage around these ideas. We need givers and activists to be in attendance as partners and peers. We need bloggers to be there to witness the power of the story and to tell it to the world. We need thinkers and visionaries to challenge us forward and we need tech people to design and implement the network supports that can emerge and serve us in the moment.
- Connected to one another by appreciative effort, we invite engagement and local action around the world/nation/community we want, and tie our passions to responsibilities, made easier by doing things together in networks, self-organized around what we love and what we are prepared to steward.
- Supported by local networks and conversations face to face and the ever increasing intimacy of global networks served through the web, we find local expression for our action but together contribute to an open source world of solutions and designs for people and places that are stuck.
- Spurred on by what is behind us we make good on our promises and what is budding in our work and use micro-philanthropy to leverage invitations to more open space events, more engaged conversations and more change. Small change becomes big news and yet the money amounts stay small, and the efforts stay local but the scale takes over. Imagine if Wikipedia were not a reference work but a change effort. Imagine if every hour spent working on that was spent working for the world we want. And imagine if we could choose the pieces to work on, contributing where we can, unafraid to make mistakes and muddle through and sense the success with nothing to lose and everything to gain…
I’m up for it. How about you?
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Michael Herman started thinking through the practices of Open Space again and yesterday we had a good conversation about the not-practices of Open Space. He has blogged about them here and here, trying on different words and language and making a case (:-)) for various iterations.
Briefly, these not-practices, or anti practices are:
- Analyzing as the opposite of appreciating (and opening)
- Protecting, defending and facilitating as the opposites of inviting
- Problem solving and fixing as the opposites of supporting (and holding)
- Accounting and making a good case as the opposite of making good (grounding)
For me these are important because thy help us to throw the practices of Open Space into high relief. I would say that “business as usual” highly values analysis, protection and defense of decisions and turf, problem solving and fixing (especially in the consulting world) and accounting and making a case as the “desired outcome” of all of this work. One of the reasons I have become so disenchanted with traditional strategic planning for example is that it proceeds from this particular world view:
- Analyse the problem
- Protect the enterprise, turf, or project from encroachment from the environment
- Fix any problems that might be around
- Measure what you have done and use it to make a business case or a best practice.
My problem with this is that it works at creating and maintaining boundaries, and rarely does anything happen. This is a common complaint about the modern work world and traditional conferences and meeting. Nothing seems to happen, but at least if we can make a good case, we can save some of the effort.
Sometimes that is useful, but I think in a world where the work of making good is the highest calling (no matter what enterprise you are in), the Open Space practices offer a way to do more effective planning:
- Appreciating the resources and assets that we have by viewing them as being of multiple use and increasing value, and being open to other resources
- Inviting choices to participate, join and work together so that people come together in a way that is more like a fellowship and less like a project team or even a community of practice
- Supporting connections between people and enterprises which means opening the boundaries of structure to find solutions from outside and allow order to self-organize and finally;
- Making good things happen and seeing the results spin out into the world in ways that you cannot control nor foresee, nor scarcely measure.
The efficacy of the Open Space worldview is evident in the difference between proprietary software development and the Open Source movement, for example. In the proprietary world (closed space worldview) one analyses the market and the need, defends the company and product from market encroachment by copyrighting it, takes full and exclusive responsibility for fixing, problem solving and debugging, and sells the thing by making a case for why your should use it through marketing and so on. In fact much of consumer culture is based on the fact that poorly working things have better crafted marketing messages. The quality is misplaced. Look at beer ads for example.
In the open source world, we appreciate what is out there, listen to what people want and invite each other to play. The invitation extends right through to bug fixing and problem solving. Anyone can play: you can code solutions or offer to pay someone to do it for you and invite others to incorporate your fixes. Instead of protecting code, it is released into the community, supported through places like Sourceforge and what is made is a good product. And from a good product, which in this case is given away, good things happen. Non-profits for example find themselves better able to meet their stated purpose in the world because they are using Open Office and therefore not spending huge sums of money on licensing.
So this is the value of seeing the not-practices of Open Space (if you can think of a better term for them let me know). They throw some more light on the benefits of what I call the Open Space worldview, and they help describe the reasons why Open Space is not a generally accepted way of doing business, even in progressively structured communities of practices.
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Here are a number of bits and pieces that have been waiting around for ages to get posted:
- Donella Meadows on being a global citizen and dancing with systems. From Bill Harris at Making Sense with Facilitated Systems.
- Getting Started with Action Learning, also from Bill.
- Dave Pollard on indigenous capacities for learning and discovery:
The word indigenous* means ‘born into and part of’, and by inference ‘inseparably connected to’. We are all, I think, indigenous at birth, born into the Earth-organism and connected in a profound and primal way to all life on the planet, even if we are born in the sterile confines of an ‘antiseptic’ hospital. But we are quickly indoctrinated into the civilized conceit of human separateness, and that conceptual separateness is reinforced by a physical separateness until, soon enough, we forget that we are a part of a constituency greater and deeper than family or state. Conception thus becomes our reality.
My most important moments of learning and discovery have occurred in those rare moments when I’ve been able to briefly shake that illusion of separateness, and re-become indigenous, liberated, part of the real world.
- More Dave, on what we can learn from aphids:
If I’m correct, then the aphid I’m looking at right now does think and feel. She wonders. She is curious. She experiences the profound joy of living, and the commensurate desire to go on living. She enjoys the company of and communication with others. She is driven to learn and gets satisfaction from doing so. She experiences emotional grief and/or physical pain at being lost, separated, witnessing the death of a fellow creature, or being stepped on. She cares about all the life she can fathom, and as long as she lives she fathoms more, and passes along more knowledge, and more reason to care, in her DNA. That is why she is here.
- Na’Cha’uaht on Indians and oil:
One of the most basic and fundamental Nuu-chah-nulth principles is embodied in the phrase, “Hish’ukish Tsa’walk” (Everything is one/connected). A full comprehension of this principle teaches us that we cannot support unsustainable development. We cannot support an industry that would threaten our watersheds with complete devastation. We cannont gladly shake the hands of corporations who use proxy governments (US, UK etc.) to wage wars all over the world, killing other Indigenous people. We cannot make the best of an inevitable corporate imposition by selling ourselves for a few jobs and money. We cannot accept this inevitability.
- Squashed Philosophers, a redux of the major thinkers that underpin Western thought.
- Getting out of confusion through conversation by Nadine Tanner:
Conversation can help move us out of the discomfort of confusion. Inquiry opens a space for meaningful conversation. It makes your intangible confusion visible to others so you can begin to build a more complete understanding.
So, next time you’re confused try staying with it for a while. Share it with others. Start conversations. Connect the otherwise unconnected dots
- Patti on following desire lines:
When faced with a bird’s eye view of my own desire lines, measuring in quick paces the decisions I’ve made or not made, do I allow them to become the real path, or do I put up a concrete barrier to redirect myself back to the “official” road? And what is that process of creating our own path? What feelings does it entail, engender, cause?
As Finch said,
“Sometimes, following unknown paths, we find ourselves in a maze of growth, in failing light, unsure where we are, flailing through jungles of stiff, impenetrable shrubs and sharp briars in deceptively benign-looking woods. All at once we realize we are lost, unable to retrace our steps. Then, suddenly, we come out onto a paved highway, far from where we thought we were, feeling a gratefulness and a relief we are ashamed to acknowledge.
But sometimes, just sometimes, we come upon a new and unexpected clearing, a magical place unanticipated in our daily thoughts or even our dreams; and when we do, we are so amazed that we cease even to wonder whether we will be able to find our way back home, or, perchance, whether this might in fact be our new home.”
- Lisa Heft’s collection of papers on Open Space Technology
- Kevin Harris’s musings on community leadership, with links to an interesting paper.