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Building containers

November 22, 2004 By Uncategorized


Frog Feast Bowl by Dale Faustich

Recently on the OSLIST we have been discussing “givens” the boundairies within which group work happens.

Both Harrison Owen and Paul Everett, an American consultant, talked about the universal givens, like the laws of self-organization and gravity. Paul wrote about the boundary conditions that tip chaos into order:

Chaos Theory, et. al. deals with ‘bounded instability’. There is a container, an edge. OS is certainly Chaos Theory in action, imho, where something will emerge but you don’t know what or where, just that form will emerge from the primordial soup. A person I met once, name long gone from my memory, unfortunately, once said there are only two rules needed to build an ant hill.

1. When an ant carrying a stick comes to another stick, it puts its stick down.
2. When an ant not carrying a stick comes to a stick, it picks the stick up (and carries it until rule 1 occurs).

That will build an ant hill within the space of the travel abilities of the ants (the container) but you cannot say where it will emerge, but emerge it will.

IMHO, just so with OS, the minimum needed conditions having been set (by the structure Harrison developed), potentially useful form will emerge.

I concur with that statement. What strikes me here is Paul’s use of the word “container” and I resonate with that. When I hold space, I do often have a sense that I am holding a container. Some First Nations Elders here on the west coast of North America talk about it using the metaphor of the feast bowl, an ornately carved dish in which food is served at feasts. The expression “the common bowl” is often used to refer to the collection of people and resources available for a task at hand: “What is in the common bowl?”

I have recently been reading about Bohmian dialogue again, especially as it was explicated by Peter Senge et. al. in The Fifth Discipline and especially the new book, Presence. They use the term “container” as well. In Presence, there is a lovely quote from John Cottrell, the president of local 13 of the the United Steelworkers of America who used dialogue in labour relations. He likened dialogue to the craft of steelmaking:

“We work with energies that can kill you, The essence of our craft lies in containing these energies. If we fail, people die. The same is true for human beings: we generate energies that can kill one another. The question is, can we hold these energies, or will they destroy us? Just as the cauldron contains the energies of molten steel, dialogue involves creating a container that can hold human energy, so that it can be transformative rather than destructive.”

I think when we work with groups as facilitators we do hold these energies. Those of you in very conflicted parts of the world will know better than I the tremendous strength needed to create and sustain a container for these energies that is transformative. My father in law called us toxin handlers: those who held those energies in a way that allow groups of people to function in a healthy way.

Sometimes I think we need explicitly stated givens to do this. In most cases though I think that the universal givens of self-organization are the ones we need to invoke, invite and hold space for. This is huge, huge work. But when we fashion the containers well, the results speak for them selves. Peace, as Harrison has noted, requires space and self-organization to emerge. These are givens, and they are worth holding.