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.
On the OSLIST, Doug wrote:
Chris and all–
Fields work…
Hosting…
living in open space…
You seem to have these evocative phrases swimming about you, Chris. Would you be so kind as to wax a little more poetic about them, put some more meat on the bones? They are, I think, getting to the heart of the question that started this thread….
The thread was about whether or not the facilitator can take an active role in an Open Space meeting, and what or why not. It has been a good thread. I responded to Doug this way:
Well Doug, these phrases are sort of short descriptions of the work I do, and there is a strange thing about them. The more I try to define them, to less important they seem. To first phrase of the Tao te Ching is something like, “The eternal Tao is the Tao that cannot be named.” So if you can accept that anything I am going to say on these matters is actually NOT the practice of these concepts, and that defining them somehow constrains what they really mean, then we can proceed.
In terms of “fields work”, let me say this. I don’t know much about this subject so I describe it more as experience. I’m willing to be that most have us have had the experience of arriving at a venue for a gathering before everyone else, scoping the place out, senseing what it feels like and imagining how our event will go. Then we facilitate an open space meeting and, being the last ones to leave we notice that the physical feeling of the space is different. I wonder why this is?
I think that it has something to do with the quality of our personal experiences in these spaces. When we are engaged in an amazing collective experience, it creates some deep change, even to the point where a room “feels” different. We participate in these kinds of collective activities all the time, but to do so consciously – not in a controlling way, just in a more aware way – seems to be the essence of working in a field. It is then we become aware of things like the impact of our presence on the field (Lisa’s awareness of her power in a group) and we can do things with that presence. The essence of doing the right thing in Open Space with that presence is of course, not doing anything at all, or rather to use the taoist concept, non-doing. That is we make a conscious choice about what we choose not to do and in doing so, we help support a field that supports emergence, self-organization and real empowerment. Field working in this respect is dependant I think on our ability to work on ourselves first, hence when we adaopt as a practice, living in open space, it changes the way we see every field of human endeavour, and it does bring us much more in line with the essentials of running an open sapce meeting.
You ask about hosting as well. I’ve been working for a few years now within the community of practice gathered under the name “Art of Hosting” and, like Open Space, I can’t describe what it is very well. I think my book, The Tao of Holding Space (which you can have for free by downloading it from http://www.chriscorrigan.com/wiki/pmwiki.php?n=Main.Papers) is my attempt to describe hosting from the perspective of “holding space.” Hosting has to do with all of the capacities we use when we engage with clients around an open space. Some of these might include:
- Seeing and sensing patterns in the organization that help to find “accupuncture points” for change,
- Taking a courageous stand for clarity.
- Encouraging others who are finding their own leadership.
- Offering teaching where it is of benefit and having the humility to be learners in th every next moment. Being “TeacherLearners.”
- Trusting in the people and holding helpful beliefs about the potential of the people.
- Being prepared to be surprised, and delightedly hosting that surprise like a long lost friend coming to pay a visit.
These practices (among many others and we all have our own) are hosting, and if we extend these into the way we live our lives, it becomes very much a case of living in open space. For me, the four principles and the one law of opens spce (plus my friend Brian Bainbridge’s “Be prepared to be be surprised” and “It’s all good :-)”) are actually very useful principles for life. I really do consciously try to live my life this way, and in doing so, I have stumbled upon the idea of fields, hosting and so on. It has made me no longer a facilitator per se but more of what John Abbe and others call “a process artist,” living as an artist, trying to find the art in everything about process, including how I ride the bus and step into a venue to open space. Our family lives in open space: for example, our children do not go to school, instead they practice – consciously and fully – the principles which my partner and I share with our clients. They work with mentors aong the lines of “whoever comes…” They explore the world along the lines of “whatever happens…” and they are not constrained by artificial timeframes on things like learning to read and write, creativity or learning.
If we are in the world saying to clients that “If you are not learning and contributing, go somewhere where you can” why would we not practice that in our family and life? It is my ten year old daughter’s favourite principle for her life – last week she wrote it out on a piece of paper and taped it to the dining room wall.
Living in Open Space is a constant life practice. It is about living in alignment with an Open Space worldview. It helps support “that feeling” we get from a good open space meeting, and bringing it into other parts of our lives.
It seems to me that when we live deeply out of that place, the role of facilitator and participant seems somehow transcended, so that, while I appreciate the distinction in some settings, and I honour it quite firmly, I find that it is a distinction that in many other settings doesn’t necessarily serve. Living in open space means living in that flow, discerning the right time for the right view and being open to whatever happens as a result.
[tags]openspacetech[\tags]
I’m just tucking into to David Weinberger’s Everything Is Miscellaneous. (I chose to start reading at the beginning by the way!). In the second chapter, on alphabetization, Weinberger talks about the arbitrariness of classification schemes for organizing knowledge. Everything ordered by human beings is done so arbitrarily, and no one scheme is going to capture exactly the right kind of order that needs to happens. This is why tagging is so important (and I confess to being a lax lately with tags. Perhaps this is a good time to change that practice).
“Knowledge is what happens when the joints of our ideas are the same as the joints of nature,” Weinberger writes. In the execution of a chaordic path, where groups and organizations are leaping to and fro between the poles of chaos and order as they find their way, harvesting knowledge must be useful to the endeavour. If the organization is evolving well, it is doing so in a natural way and so the knowledge that is being generated must be useful also in a natural way.
When I worked for government, the classification schemes we were required to use to file documents were so completely aribitrary that in three years I never filed a single thing, for fear that I would never be able to find it again. Instead, I kept files in my office, most often in piles and binders relating to the work I was doing. Things were tagged by post it notes if they could exist in more than one pile. I needed my own scheme. Since 1999 I haven’t used a filing cabinet and in the last year I have gone completely paperless, depending instead on Google Desktop to find what I am looking for in my digital world.
This is nothing new, but it has major ramifications for harvesting. We want to be helpful as facilitators and create clusters for groups of people that seem to reflect patterns we are seeing. The problem of course is that any scheme developed by one person excludes the social reality of the group. And so lately, I have been turning over classification to groups of people and using post-its to tag things so that we can find them again later. As soon as possible getting a harvest into a taggable digital format is essential so that it can be remixed and used in innovative ways, reflecting the chaordic journey a group is on.
This is something to add to the Art of Harvesting materials we are working on.
[tags]David Weinberger, Everything is Miscellaneous, tagging, chaordic, filing, knowledge management[/tags]
There is something ineffable about being held in a space that is hosted. One of the key things that simply can’t be taught in any facilitation training is “presence.” It’s possible to talk about it, to model it and even to help others connect with it, but you can’t transmit it. It is not a technical piece. It is a practice.
I make a lot of connections between hosting practice and martial arts practice. Today, looking through some of the handful of martial arts weblogs I read, I discovered this post:
Regardless of how many years you’ve spent in the dojo, the possibility always exists that you’ll encounter something you’ve never seen before in your training. So how do you avoid this ugly scene before it happens? Believe it or not, this starts by how you present yourself to the world. If you appear arrogant and look for trouble, there’s no doubt you’ll find it. However, if you perceive yourself as a victim or a loser, you’ll end up for sure as someone’s target practice. The key is to combine equal amounts of humility and confidence that you have developed from your training into your daily life. Humility and confidence are the yin and yang of the martial artist’s persona. The great swordsman/strategist Miyamoto Musashi once said, “The warrior must make his warrior’s walk his everyday walk”. This is a quality of living that can’t be faked, and its essence can be felt even by strangers. I’ve read accounts of how martial artists should carry themselves in public; exuding grace, good posture and so on, but I believe that there’s an ineffability to the martial artist that goes beyond the physical.
You can discover more advice from Musashi in The Book of Five Rings. I’m always curious about how others describe this ineffable part of working with people. What’s your practice?
Some notes and stuff from my trips around the web:
- Passion bounded by responsibility is one of the tenets of Open Space. To see how powerful this is in action, you should go and visit WikiClock. Very simply, it’s a clock that shows the current time if you update it to do so. It’s a ridiculous notion, until you realize that it actually works. And if you still don’t know what a wiki is, Viv McWaters has come across a video that might help you understand it a lot better.
- Jack Ricchiuto has discovered something about appreciative leadership in Aboriginal communities that has long formed the basis of my practice: “he understanding is that childhood traumas cause our souls to fragment. The work of healing is to enable the reclaiming of these parts of our souls – like wisdom, love, and courage – that are ours to reclaim.”
- It still amazes me how intimate people can be in person after engaging with each other over time on weblogs. Since my lunch with new friends in London last weekend, Richard and Kevin have both posted interesting thoughts about this particular lunch on their blogs. If you still haven’t had the experience of meeting someone physically whom you have known only through a blog, I recommend it. It will blow your mind.
- One of the processes we used in Belgium for looking at ourselves was a systemic constellation. I’m quite interested in this methodology (here is a website for the community of practice) and would welcome anythoughts from those who have used it in organizations and communities about resources that are useful for understanding it in those contexts.
- Finally this week, a note on a great looking training offered by my friend Christine Whitney Sanchez in Colorado this summer combining Open Space, Appreciative Inquiry, World Cafe and Polarity Management. It’s just one more offering on the kinds of things we teach at an art of hosting. You can also explore these ideas through a workshop with Myriam Laberge and Brenda Chaddock, which they call “Wise Action that Lasts.” (July 9-11 near Vancouver, BC) and of course you could also come to an Art of Hosting training, several of which are going on in Europe and North America this summer and fall.