Card from the Osho Zen Tarot This thread on circles is getting some legs. It has generated a flood of responses at the Open Space email list, Dave Pollard picked it up and today Fast Company magazine’s blog quotes Dave. Wonderful! And yet, my favourite response so far comes from my friend Ashley Cooper who emailed the OSLIST with this gem from the poet Osho: “Your inner being, when it opens, first experiences two directions: the height, the depth. And then slowly, slowly, as this becomes your established situation, you start looking around, spreading into all other eight directions. And …
For those of you who may be so inclined, this blog now has an RSS feed which can be found at the bottom of the sidebar. Other than showing that my postings all happen in 1969, it seems to work okay.
I’ve been asking around about the properties of circles. Mostly I’ve been querying the OSLIST community and there have been some fine responses. My query began with a quote from the “script” I use when I open space in OST meetings: Circles are really rather neat forms of geometry because they force us to have a look at things in a particular way. For example in a circle, we don’t really know who “the leader” is. In fact we may be forgiven for thinking that the leader is either not here, or is each one of us. And as a …
Flemming Funch points to a great collection of citizen participation resources, which includes Open Space Technology and 62 other approaches to helping groups converse and make decisions. I love collections like this. As a facilitator, I mostly design my own processes and tools for meetings depending on what the client wants. Open Space Technology is really the only “fixed” process I use. I draw heavily on Appreciative Inquiry, scenario planning, and a variety of other approaches to group work in all the design work I do, so it’s great to come across these kinds of tools to refresh my memory …
We’ve come to the end of the blog swap experiment, and here are my thoughts about it: First of all, it has enriched my blog. Chris introduced some new topics to my blog, and the depth of his thinking and writing are an inspiration for me. Especially his thinking on the nature of this experiment just blew me away. He wrote very eloquently about it here, and I for one, will certainly try to shift my thinking on blogs from a “place” metaphor to a “pants” metaphor from now on :o) I found myself getting a little worried that the …