Father Brian, Photo by Peggy Holman
The Open Space community has lost one of it’s stalwart elders, Father Brian Bainbridge, a Catholic priest and corporate consultant from Melbourne, Australia. Brian was a dear friend and colleague and offered much to the shape and form of Open Space although his contributions were quiet and behind the scenes. He trained and taught many, many Australian Open Space facilitators, wrote an informally published ebook about his experiences creating and Open Space organization in his parish and was a stalwart for the integrity of the process, curious in the multiple ways self-organization and complex adaptive systems could work. Today on the OSLIST I shared my own recollections of Brian:
Ah.
What a blessing it was to know and be loved by Brian…a man absolutely generous in his equanimity, achingly funny and self-deprecating and absolutely committed to the integrity and effectiveness of Open Space. I have several audio recordings of conversations I spent with him over the years. If I can find them and clean them up, perhaps I’ll get them uploaded somewhere.
As far as I know one of Brian’s enduring legacies to the Open Space community was the coinage of the unofficial fifth principle: Be Prepared to Be Surprised. Perhaps others can concur, but I always associated him strongly with that principle. And in his death he surprised us all! All I can think of is his mischievous smile and quiet bubbling chuckle.
The other phrase that entered my vocabulary from Brian was “It’s all good.” And indeed I notice that today his death has given me a chance to revisit my feelings of tenderness and admiration and love for him, to connect with people in the OS world I haven’t head from for a while and generally spend some time in my virtual home.
My favourite Brian story, a story he told me: Once when working with a group of Australian IBM managers he listened patiently while they told him of their struggles working so far away from headquarters in an extremely hierarchical structure with an almost dogmatic approach to things. Brian listened sympathetically for a while and then made the incisive observation: “You call yourselves Big Blue. Well, Catholic priests have suffered this same management challenge for 1500 years and ore. Call us Big Black.”
My family is finally travelling to Melbourne in May to do some work with Viv McWaters and Anne Patillo and Geoff Brown and Johnnie Moore and we were really looking forward to seeing Brian in his own place. Alas, we won’t have that chance now, but you can bet when we open space together Brian will be invoked and I will relish the chance to raise a glass and tell some stories about our patron Father, our mentor, teacher and friend.
And then just like that, you hop a plane from Johannesburg, stop after 8 hours in Dakar for refuelling. Take another 9 hours to arrive in New York, take a cab into the city with a great driver who hails from Guinea and is going back there to work on the democratic elections this spring, and you get dropped in front of a small boutique hotel on Madison Avenue. The air is cold and crisp and the city seems to be in a good mood.
The woman at the check in counter at The MAve Hotel directs me to Penelope, a great little breakfast place at E 30th and Lexington Ave, where I have just downed a great tasting egg and pesto sandwich on a croissant, surrounded by people talking about real estate deals, high blodd pressure medication and book promotion tours.
It’s a huge difference in some ways and just another city in other ways. I am reminded how much I love being in New York City, and how much I love eastern North American cities in general in the winter – New York, Boston, Toronto, Montreal, Ottawa. All places I have some lingering presence in, some impression left on me from the dark and blustery days of winter, the days when, as a young man, I crept away to late night coffee shops to read and write poetry, or out to hear jazz and blues muted behind closed doors and windows dripping with condensation.
Just as languishing over the weekend in the leafy northern suburbs of Johannesburg brought me to my childhood growing up in Toronto – and to my partner’s childhood in South Africa – being here in new York this morning evokes a kind of nostalgia and a kind of energy for exploration. I feel like a young man again, half my age, a free day in New York, bracing air and bright eyed people. Somehow cleansed from my trip. Clear eyed.
It’s Groundhog Day in the United States, a strange holiday. The day in which one solitary animal in Pennsylvania awakes from his winter hibernation, takes a look out of his burrow and gauges what he sees. If he sees his shadow, it’s six more weeks of winter.
Somehow this captures what it is like to have arrived here in the United States from Africa. Today is a good day to wake up and see our shadows. Can we see the connection between the the crime and poverty and disparity of wealth and the apartheid-by-another-name of South Africa and daily life on the streets of midtown Manhattan? A cab driver dreams of returning to Africa to work for a democratic solution to the turmoil in Guinea, a country that hasn’t known the ethnic conflicts and civil wars of its neighbours. he worries that unless people get to work, that might change and Guinea could descend into bloodshed because the bigger powers in the world, some of them in the office buildings above us, may decide to act ruthlessly for the oil and resources that the country is endowed with.
North America and Europe has a nearly trillion dollar arms industry, much of which, in the form of small arms, ends up in Africa. the hands of despotic leaders, paramilitary death squads, gang leaders and petty criminals are filled with this deadly engineering that generates huge amounts of wealth for the North. The oil and precious metals that power our economies are extracted from the coastal platforms of Senegal, the forests of the Democratic Republic of Congo and the diamond mines of Kimberly. Whatever we want in North America we can have. Cross some palms with dollars and ammunition and turn away from the shadow. A bright day dawns.
Our shadows are all around us, and to see them this clearly means two things. First, it means more winter – that the hard times are not yet done that weeks complicated and mindful living still lie between now and the promise and ease of spring. Second, it means that the sun is shining, something is warming my back, throwing my silhouette on the ground. And that the winter continues.
What a complicated world! What an untidy conclusion! What a way to try and capture the truth of this strange trip I’ve been on!
On the way into Manhattan today my cab driver, Bubu, asked me what my impression of Africa was. I admitted that it was limited – I had only spent a week there, most of it in a middle class suburb or on a safari ranch and all of it in the company of middle class people. But I said that the overwhelming impression was that Africa differed from North America in a key way: in Africa, the truth is valued above everything else. Here in North America we are quick to sacrifice truth at the alter of a happy ending but African stories would never do that. To do so is the ultimate betrayal of promise. To tell the story of South Africa as a successful miracle of transition to democracy would be to betray the promise of what the struggle was all about. It was about truth. Clear, shiny, complicated, messy, dark truth.
Bubu, my driver, smiled widely. “Exactly,” he said.