Courtenay, BC I’m coming to the end of a Moleskine notebook I’ve had since March, and it’s almost filled up. I’m going through it harvesting a few things, and thought I might post a series of notes here. The journal began with a few notes that I made about the preliminary design of an Art of Hosting we ran for VIATT on Quadra Island. This particular Art of Hosting was called to train with 40 or so people who are helping us to build an Aboriginal child and familiy services system on Vancouver Island. It’s big …
One session in Camden last week that really grabbed my interest was hosted by my dear friend and colleague Father Brian Bainbridge from Australia. Brian is another remarkable man, generous, dry in his humour and open hearted. He has been working on a little book for a while about brining Open Space to parish life, which documents his stories of working with the parishoners of St. Scholastica’s in Melbourne. In a little over two years, Brian has been exploring the transformation that comes about from shifting from the managerial worldview to the open space worldview. What …
In the OSLIST discussion on circles and presence, I added some thoughts, which I thought I’d republish here… My experience of the circle is first of all, that there has never been a group I have worked with – not business people, airplane engineers, entrepreneurs, government officials, community members – that hasn’t been just fine in a circle. No one has ever asked me not to set the room up a different way, although plenty of people have expressed their doubts that any of it would work. I’ve also done OST in other formats as well, like lecture halls, semi …
Harrison Owen muses on circles, presence and Open Space on the OSLIST: As I have listened to this conversation (a very rich one!) random thoughts came to mind – which may actually fit together? The first one went something like this. We speak, understandably, about “doing an Open Space” – but I suspect that may box us into a corner we need not be stuck in. “Doing and Open Space” implies that we are following a certain set of prescribed procedures, after all Open Space Technology is a method. This is true, but it may also hide a larger truth, …
Nick Smith has a nice post on common vision and team building in which he offers a few useful approaches for building common bonds, prefaced by this: I’ve never been comfortable with the word ’empowerment’. It’s speak to me of something manipulative and I’ve never found that motivation works that way. I tend to agree with what Henry Miller said, “The only way in which anyone can lead us is to restore to us the belief in our own guidance.” I like that.