That is one of the principles of wayfinding, which is simply to say that if you don’t know what to do, start anywhere and follow it somewhere. Each step will reveal the next thing to do.
For a beautiful, beautiful exercise in doing this, go here and play for a while with the ToneMatrix.
Morsels that are left on my plate:
Just a note that if you are an Open Space facilitator and you twitter, the hashtag #openspace is a useful way to tag what you are doing. There are lots of great real time reflections in that feed, and I love especially the fact that the tag has been set up and is used extensively by people not involved in the centre of the Open Space Technology practitioner community, meaning of course that the Open Space Technology practitioner community has finally dissolved into the world like Harrison always hoped it would.
I’m stranded in San Fransico, sitting on standby for a flight home after narrowly missing my flight yesterday evening due to a big accident on the Golden Gate bridge. So sitting the lounge, guiltily hoping every two hours that someone has some minor misfortune or change of plans that will open up one seat on a day when every flight home is full.
Found a poem by Denise Levertov at the excellent Panhala:
A Gift
Just when you seem to yourself
nothing but a flimsy web
of questions, you are given
the questions of others to hold
in the emptiness of your hands,
songbird eggs that can still hatch
if you keep them warm,
butterflies opening and closing themselves
in your cupped palms, trusting you not to injure
their scintillant fur, their dust.
You are given the questions of others
as if they were answers
to all you ask. Yes, perhaps
this gift is your answer.~ Denise Levertov ~
Lovely day here in Marin County hanging out with friends and charting some interesting paths forward on a few projects. One highlight of the day was spending time with Amy Lenzo, who I have known for a while but met only one time previously when we were on an diverse and eclectic team of facilitators holding space at the Pegasus systems thinking conference a couple of years ago. Amy is, among other things, the web goddess for The World Cafe community and we spent a lovely lunch at the excellent Buckeye Roadhouse talking over the nature of our work, the ways in which we look at the art of hosting within rich social spaces and what is at the core of our approach to things. We were reflecting on what the World Cafe, Open Space, Berkana and Art of Hosting communities (among many others) have in common and it comes down to these four things – archetypal patterns if you will:
These four patterns form a set of foundations about our practice. They stand in contrast to foundations of group work for which:
These distinctions are useful because the source patterns serve as an invitation. If you find yourself in alignment with the first set of patterns, you’ll probably find kin in the Cafe, Open Space, Berkana and Art of Hosting communities. If you relate more to the second set you ‘ll probably find yourself engaged with people from more traditional training backgrounds. There is certainly a time and place for both, and the skillful application of one or the other sets of foundations is what is brought by artful process practitioners.
