Registration for our most recent offering is open. Click here to learn more. 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 …
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 …
In this video, Harrison Owen discusses the chaos that is disrupting the order we take for granted and begins to create a new order and a different world. Harrison has been saying much the same thing for his entire career, starting with his dissertation on Aramaic and associated mythologies and cosmologies. He has been a long-time student of the dance of chaos and order, and his development of Open Space Technology came from this lifelong inquiry. i encountered Open Space first through an event that was hosted by Anne Stadler and Angeles Arien in 1995, and I met Harrison for …
Part 1: Introduction to the model Part 2: A deeper dive into the model The two loops model emerged from many years of conversations amongst people working in the Berkana Exchange and their friends and mates in the late 1990s and early 2000s. As my friend Tim Merry pointed out on a comment at LinkedIn, the model itself was an emergent framework of how organizing happens on what we called back then “trans local” communities of practice. The Berkana Exchange was made up of many learning hubs around the world in places like Zimbabwe, South Africa, Senegal, India, Brazil, Mexico …