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Have you been bitten by the complexity bug yet?
I think after several years of facilitating, leading or organizing, most folks get curious about how things work. Why did that meeting go that way? How did our organizational culture become so bad despite so many good people here? Why can’t we seem to make a dent in this substance misuse issue in our town?
In the arts of working with groups of humans, very few of us have any kind of formal training in how to do it. What formal training exists in credentialed institutions tends to avoid a deep focus on complexity and emergence in favour of teaching the skills and tools that can bring various degrees of order to a situation.
These will serve you well for sure. But there comes a time when you are expected to run something, solve something or lead something when you just can’t put your finger on it, and all your best efforts stall. That’s when the curiosity gets triggered, and “Why?” becomes an active part of your vocabulary.
I have often said that Caitlin and I offer our company’s services in very specific circumstances: to do highly participatory work in highly complex environments. While those are specific contexts for our work, they are not uncommon contexts for our work. For both of us it would be impossible to do this work without a good grounding in theory that underlies our practice. I credit people like Harrison Owen, Toke Moeller, Dee Hock, Dave Snowden, Glenda Eoyang, and many other thinkers and practitioners for grounding my work in complexity and co-creative participation. Caitlin’s work is grounded in Byron Katie, Pema Chödron, and new thinking in cognitive and neuroscience research. Together, we have built a body of work that helps us to work with complex situations to support leadership, nudge cultures towards more life-giving contexts, and strengthen people and communities to live with and thrive in uncertainty.
We call the work Complexity Inside and Out because it acknowledges that every diabolical situation we find ourselves in has a tangle of dynamics that include what’s happening inside of ourselves and what is happening around us. The bad news is that there are no clear root causes for these situations and no way to predict what will happen next with a high degree of certainty. Still, the good news is that there are many places where people can make a difference to move situations in a preferred direction of travel, which to me is typically towards life-giving, affirming, meaningful activities and results. That’s what we aim to do with this program: increase your resourcefulness to support your work with humans in complex environments.
We’ve offered this program three times now to an incredibly diverse group of people working in many different fields, from health care, education, business, sport, philanthropy, Indigenous communities, faith communities, justice, social and environmental action and many other sectors. We’ve dived together into issues of power and equity as complex phenomena, looked at how cultures form and, stabilize and change, thought about evaluation and knowledge, explored leadership, worked on ways to address our own thinking and behaviours that compromise our abilities to design lead and co-create in uncertain situations.
We’d love for you to join us in this extended discovery. We’re proud of our program, which delivers a lot of content, practice, and a chance to learn it individually and with a cohort of buddies with whom you can explore these ideas in more detail.
Have a look at our website to learn more. Drop me an email or a comment here if you have questions. Come on the journey.
By way of Peggy Holman, I was pointed to this video of an Open Space meeting recently held in Balama, Liberia. It’s a sweet thing, because Harrison Owen was deeply inspired by the village of Balama where he worked in the 1960s as part of the US Peace Corps. He attributes some of his inspiration for Open Space Technology to his experiences there, working with local folks as they organized and developed their community.
One of the hundreds of Open Space Technology Principles posters I have used in my time, this one from an Art of Hosting training in Minnesota in 2012, and designed by a team member.
NOTE: I edited the title of this to make it clear that I’m not calling Harrison a “shaman,” but rather trying to correct a meme that has been going around which has appropriated his work.
There is a post going around on the internet called “The Four Laws of the Shaman” or the “Four Laws of Spirituality.” The four laws are ascribed to some unknown shaman or some exotic culture like “Indian spirituality” or “Native American wisdom.” You can visit the links I’ve provided here to get a sense of the text. And, of course, this stuff is all over Facebook, where it gets shared endlessly. The earliest reference to these “Four Laws of a Shaman” I could find is from a Facebook page in 2011.
This kind of thing always gets my hackles up because it is possible that these sorts of sayings are attributable to a person who may be a specific teacher in a specific spiritual lineage or tribal community. Erasing their voice is a kind of colonization, so please don’t share these kinds of unattributed nuggets of wisdom unless you can quote a source.
In this case, however, the source is not a tribal elder from an exotic locale, but is Harrison Owen from Maryland, USA and the “Four Laws” are actually the original four principles of Open Space Technology. Here is one version of these “four laws of a shaman” from the posts:
- “The person who comes into your life is the right person”
- “What happens is the only thing that could have happened”
- “Anytime it starts is the right time.”
- “When something ends, it ends”
Anyone familiar with this blog or Open Space Technology will recognize right away that these are the original four principles of Open Space Technology, to whit:
- Whoever comes is the right people.
- Whatever happens is the only thing that could have.
- Whenever it starts is the right time.
- When it’s over, it’s over.
(And there is a fifth principle that was added within the last decade or so which says “Where ever it happens is the right place” but I’m old skool and the truth is I forget that one all the time)
The original reference for these principles is Harrison’s “Open Space Technology: A User’s Guide, first edition” originally published in 1992. The principles and the law of two feet are outlined in Chapter Five, pp 68-74. Before that, these principles were articulated in the late 1980s and published in the original set of notes Harrison wrote about the process sometime in 1987 or 1988. You can find that document at the worldwide archive of the Open Space Technology community of practice.
Harrison is incredibly generous with his work, and you can find much of his out-of-print work available at the Harrison Owen Library at openspaceworld.org. There is a library of his papers there too.
Sometimes, it is asserted that Harrison got these principles from a Liberian village. This isn’t true. Harrison did a stint in the US Peace Corps in the 1960s and documented village life in Liberia while working on community projects. You can read a beautiful photo essay of his observations in “When the Devil Dances” at the Internet Archive. He never claimed to see Open Space in action there. Rather, he was taken with how the community addressed a complex agricultural issue, and he cut his teeth on designing participatory processes in that work, which is documented in some detail in The Practice of Peace.
The Organizational Transformation conferences he helped run in the early 1980s (documented here) were the first use of the method, specifically at OT3 in 1985. His story of how he came to develop and use the method with many others is documented in his many papers and books, especially Expanding Our Now. He has been interviewed countless times, done TEDx talks and is always up for a chat, so if you want to hear the story from the horse’s mouth, you have abundant opportunity to do so.
Harrison is an incredible guy, a deep river of experience and knowledge. His folksy manner and his constant exhortations to simplify one’s facilitation practice don’t come close to giving the full breadth of his life’s work its due. He is a priest, a theologian, a scholar of Near East religion, myth and culture, a former bureaucrat, community organizer, consultant, teacher, and author, and his whole life has only partially been about Open Space. I’m pretty sure he wouldn’t describe himself as a shaman but he was an important mentor in my life. He was the first person to introduce me to complexity theory, to spirit in organizations and to the dynamics of self-organization which transformed my facilitation practice.
So. The next time you see these “shaman’s laws” shared in your circles, feel free to bring these receipts and give Harrison his due.