Having a weblog in addition to having a regular website means that there are two front doors to my online home. There have been a lot of searches here lately for facilitation and Open Space resources, so I thought I would highlight the collections that I maintain through two pages here.
I hope you find these useful. Let me know how they are for you.
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Michael Herman started thinking through the practices of Open Space again and yesterday we had a good conversation about the not-practices of Open Space. He has blogged about them here and here, trying on different words and language and making a case (:-)) for various iterations.
Briefly, these not-practices, or anti practices are:
- Analyzing as the opposite of appreciating (and opening)
- Protecting, defending and facilitating as the opposites of inviting
- Problem solving and fixing as the opposites of supporting (and holding)
- Accounting and making a good case as the opposite of making good (grounding)
For me these are important because thy help us to throw the practices of Open Space into high relief. I would say that “business as usual” highly values analysis, protection and defense of decisions and turf, problem solving and fixing (especially in the consulting world) and accounting and making a case as the “desired outcome” of all of this work. One of the reasons I have become so disenchanted with traditional strategic planning for example is that it proceeds from this particular world view:
- Analyse the problem
- Protect the enterprise, turf, or project from encroachment from the environment
- Fix any problems that might be around
- Measure what you have done and use it to make a business case or a best practice.
My problem with this is that it works at creating and maintaining boundaries, and rarely does anything happen. This is a common complaint about the modern work world and traditional conferences and meeting. Nothing seems to happen, but at least if we can make a good case, we can save some of the effort.
Sometimes that is useful, but I think in a world where the work of making good is the highest calling (no matter what enterprise you are in), the Open Space practices offer a way to do more effective planning:
- Appreciating the resources and assets that we have by viewing them as being of multiple use and increasing value, and being open to other resources
- Inviting choices to participate, join and work together so that people come together in a way that is more like a fellowship and less like a project team or even a community of practice
- Supporting connections between people and enterprises which means opening the boundaries of structure to find solutions from outside and allow order to self-organize and finally;
- Making good things happen and seeing the results spin out into the world in ways that you cannot control nor foresee, nor scarcely measure.
The efficacy of the Open Space worldview is evident in the difference between proprietary software development and the Open Source movement, for example. In the proprietary world (closed space worldview) one analyses the market and the need, defends the company and product from market encroachment by copyrighting it, takes full and exclusive responsibility for fixing, problem solving and debugging, and sells the thing by making a case for why your should use it through marketing and so on. In fact much of consumer culture is based on the fact that poorly working things have better crafted marketing messages. The quality is misplaced. Look at beer ads for example.
In the open source world, we appreciate what is out there, listen to what people want and invite each other to play. The invitation extends right through to bug fixing and problem solving. Anyone can play: you can code solutions or offer to pay someone to do it for you and invite others to incorporate your fixes. Instead of protecting code, it is released into the community, supported through places like Sourceforge and what is made is a good product. And from a good product, which in this case is given away, good things happen. Non-profits for example find themselves better able to meet their stated purpose in the world because they are using Open Office and therefore not spending huge sums of money on licensing.
So this is the value of seeing the not-practices of Open Space (if you can think of a better term for them let me know). They throw some more light on the benefits of what I call the Open Space worldview, and they help describe the reasons why Open Space is not a generally accepted way of doing business, even in progressively structured communities of practices.
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For those of you that read in newsfeeders you won’t have noticed that I changed the template of the blog again. I think it’s now a little easier to read, but let me know.
At any rate, light blogging this month. I have been involved in some incredibly draining work of late, the most recent of which required me to be substantially bigger than I normally have been. I was holding space for a day long circle dialogue on Aboriginal child welfare in British Columbia. It was a full day with many important people from throughout the system who came together to look at how we might work at changing the deepest assumptions about the child welfare system to focus on interdependence. A very rewarding day, and a few reports are forthcoming, but I found myself deeply tired after this event. On reflection, I think it was largely a result of holding myself in solid purpose, and deeply committed to facilitating a process that took a conversation to a place none of us could have guessed. It was, in the words of Donald Rothberg, committed action with nonnattachment to outcome. And it’s a very draining thing to do.
When I say that the day required me to “be bigger” I mean, metaphorically speaking, that process work like this requires us to be both big enough to contain the energy and the edges of the circle, and small enough that we don’t get in the way of what is emerging. It is to be both committed to the action and invisible enough that the outcome arises collectively, without personal baggage attached. And there was another level at work here too, in which I needed to embody the values that were being articulated by the group. They were saying for example, that the Aboriginal child welfare system needs to be based on the assumption that no one person can make a decision for a child. For a facilitator hearing that who is willing to embody this deep change in real time, I was required to be in a present moment of reflective practice: “How can I embody this emerging value and validate the group’s sense that we need to base process on this value? Right now, even?” Very tiring to do that and still hold the container open.
I mention Buddhist teacher Donald Rothberg because today I was listening to this podcast where he speaks of this kind of work. Towards the end of this talk, he mentions characteristics of committed action with nonattachment to outcomes:
- Appreciating the journey. If results are not everything, then we can have a greater appreciation for the journey we are on, and we are better able to live in the present moment and be of best use there.
- Recognizing that there is no failure. This is not to absolve oneself of responsibility. It is rather to adopt the mindset that every experience contains the seeds of great teaching. We can learn from everything that happens if we view “results” as simply another point in time at which we reflect, and that we undertake that reflection with no judgement. Rather we seek to evaluate based on what we can learn in the present in order to adjust our future actions. Developing these reflective capacities is a central practice of good facilitation, good leadership and good action.
- Long term view. Accepting the fact that failure is really just an approach to results means that we are freer to see the impact of our work over the long term. Rothberg mentions the founder of Sarvodaya, Dr. AT Ariyaratne who says that the peace plan for the civil war in Sri Lanka must be a 500 year plan because the roots of the conflict extend back that far. There is no way we can measure results if there is a 500 year view, but if there is to be true, deep and sustainable peace in Sri Lanka, the solution must come from the true, deep and sustainable foundation. Nonattachment to outcomes allows us to see deeper causes and longer term sustainable solutions. We work then on a vector, in a direction and not towards an end in itself.
- Resting in the mystery of how things happen. I can think of dozens of small decisions in my life that have resulted in huge life changes. Deciding one afternoon to visit a friend who offered me a job which set my career in motion. Waking up one morning and deciding it was worth it to brave a autumn sleet storm to see a live CBC radio broadcast, and meeting my life partner that morning as a result. Everyone has these experiences. The fact is that nonattachment to outcomes admits the possibilities that the smallest things might actually have the biggect impact. You may spend the next year at work toughing it out to bring a project to life, working late hours and always being the last one to leave the office. The project may be a success or not, but what if the relationship you develop with the evening security guard, the simple greetings and the occaisional short chat were enough to bring him from a state of despondant isolation to appreciating life again? Sometimes people can be brought back from the brink of isolation and suicide by people reaching out to them. That may be the most important result of your year long project.
It’s a serious practice, this idea of being fully committed and nonattached to outcomes, but recently it has helped me get through some heavy work. I wonder where it shows up in your life and practice?
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As Michael and I make some progress on our writing, I find that I have been assembling together bits and pieces of writing I have done over the years and putting some papers up at my site.
Today I want to invite you to have a look at a new paper called “Six observations about seeing” which is composed from some blog posts I made 18 months ago or so.
As always, comments are welcome.
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Inspired by a project I have been involved in with the Anecdote boys and Viv McWaters, I have written a paper on language and leadership practices in convening a dialogue. Here’s the introduction…
William Isaacs book Dialogue and the Art of Thinking Together is continually inspiring reading. It equates very well with the practices that we are teaching fo Open Space facilitation and it is a useful guide for other forms of process facilitation. In the book, Isaacs describes four fields of conversation, essentially politeness, breakdown, inquiry and flow. Within each of these four fields of dialogue, there are a number of practices to cultivate and things to do as the nature of the dialogue keeps changing. In a short chapter but important on convening dialogue, Isaacs outlines a guide for leadership in each of these four areas. I have been using this guide more and more frequently and, in addition to Isaacs’ work, I have been collecting questions and language approaches to help move deeper into these dialogic spaces. What follows is a brief overview of the four fields, Isaacs guide to navigating the fields and the questions with which I have been working.
The whole paper is yours to read. I’d appreciate any comments.