Michael Herman and I ran an Open Space practice retreat here on Bowen Island a couple of weeks ago, and while he was here we made major progress in our thinking about the Open Space Practices. Here’s some of that thinking.
When Harrison Owen conceived of Open Space and ran the initial experiments in the 1980s he said that he hoped that Open Space would eventually become ubiquitous, that it would fade away and just become the way people do business. For a long time I thought that this meant Harrison hoped Open Space would become like brainstorming: used everywhere all the time without any thought to its origins or mechanics.
I’m now coming to realize that Open Space does indeed fade away, or at least fades into the background when my use of the process dissolves into practice. If anything, this long journey into articulating and understanding the four practices of Open Space has been an effort to understand what I’m learning about organizations, communities, leadership and passion in Open Space and applying that learning throughout my life and work.
Dissolving into practice. That is the essence of why this stuff matters. Some of the participants we had with us here on Bowen Island a couple of weeks ago reported coming to learn about the mechanics of Open Space and leaving with a deeper knowing of how space can be opened everywhere. That is what we are after: cultivating the practices of open space so that it can happen everywhere, at any time and in many different guises. For me, sometimes this takes the form of an Open Space Technology meeting, but there are something like 345 days a year when I am NOT in an Open Space meeting, and yet I’m still practicing.
Michael and I continue to look for ways to make this story accessible and practice-able as we deepen our exploration of these ideas. In the past we have talked about the four practices as Opening, Inviting, Holding and Grounding. This language still holds, and in fact a number of different words and concepts are useful, because these four words describe practice areas in which many distinct practices can be gathered.
After working through the fire of a workshop and some fantastic conversations, we have refined the ore a little more and we are now using the following descriptions:
- Appreciating: noticing what we have, what’s good, what’s easy and possible to develop, what wants to be born. This is an area where our individual practices incloude opening our hearts, cultivating compassion for others and finding ways to join ourselves to the work through connecting purposes.
- Inviting Choice: When we invite, we invite people to join us and in the act of doing so they choose to be our allies. This is profound, because when people choose to be with us, to “live in truth” with us as Vaclav Havel would say, then our purposes are joined and our work becomes meaningful and important. Creating conditions that invite choice is the essence of leadership in Open Space leading to…
- Supporting Connection: which is the way we help each other, once joined, to do the work.. WE bring resources, time, attention, help and put it to work to support evolving and changing structures that arise and fall away to be useful exactly when they are needed. The essence of supporting connection is a complex world is in letting go of control, holding space for new things to emerge and supporting the energy when the do emerge.
- Making Good: this is the logical outcome. When we are in alignment, and our purposes are joined and our connections supported, we ground all of that by making good. Making good looks like better, improved, peaceful, powerful, deeper, happier, healthier. All kinds of organizations have making good as their focus, and within those organizations, people making good will find ways to continue lending their time and attention to the work at hand. When work becomes about something else, it turns into drudgery and control and compulsion are the only ways to keep people around. So we make good on promises, responsibilities, commitments and we make good on fulfilling our purpose in the world.
We’re ploughing away on lots more writing and thinking about this. I reckon there’s a book in it at some point.
Sun and clouds above the Strait of Georgia
I was listening to this podcast this morning, a conversation between Krista Tippet and John Polkinghorne regarding the marriage of quantum physics and religion (which incidently is a subject Ken Wilber has also taken on recently in a podcast). It is an excellent conversation and I found myself grooving along with the theme of the universe as both predictable to some extent and unpredictable at the same time. Polkinhorne makes the analogy with clocks and clouds, saying that the sun rises and sets and we can predict when that will happen using Newtonian physics (and clocks), and also there is much uncertainly in the world, which he calls “clouds:” unpredictable possibility, structure on the edge of chaos and order.
My mind got busy and I started thinking about how peering into the sky, one can see this all the time. The sun, stars, moon and planets that we see in the sky can be predicted and clocked. The clouds that move across them are full of potential and beauty and complexity and there is no way we can account for or predict the specific form of any of them.
And then I began to notcie the sky itself – clear, transparent, irrelevent to both the objects and the clouds and yet the medium in which both exist, and I began to think that this is a good model for thinking about facilitation. As facilitators we hold space for both order and chaos to play at the same time. We are barely noticable when we are working well, and when people gaze into our container they see only the play of clouds or the precise edges of stars and moon, and forget that they are also looking at the sky itself.
Facilitating as sky means opening THAT big and inviting both clouds and sun to play with one another and to admit the possibility for amazing and astonishing beauty to arise from their coexistence. It is the essence of holding space in chaordic process.
I first met Annette Clancy when she responded to my call to help design the appreciative summit on Aboriginal youth suicide I did last May. Now she has hit her stride in the blogging world with a great blog called “Interactions.”
Today she put out a super post outlining a process called Dynamic Participation, which contains 10 principles for her approach.
Good to see her in the game!
At the Public Resources page of the Center for Contemplative Dialogue you will find an interesting little publication called The Path of Contemplative Dialogue: Engaging the Collective Spirit (.pdf), by Stephen Wirth. In the book, contemplative dialogue is seen as radiating from some core principles:
- Trust in the basic unity of human people and all life.
- Nonviolence in spirit, word, and action.
- Commitment to seeking truth with compassion and humility.
- Commitment to speaking truth with compassion and humility.
- Willingness to risk suspending the rush to action.
These principles are close to my core principles of facilitation but with some emphasis on truth that I’m toying with adding to my own list.
The implications of these principles and the process that emerges from them can extend in many places. In a recent discussion on the National Coalition for Dialogue and Deliberation list, Wirth offered some insights into how to make large scale conferences worthwhile learning experiences using contemplative dialogue approaches:
Engaging a group seriously and looking at what its common purpose is, how its ability to learn well together affects the state of the organization or field, and honestly naming the problems that arise from the individual learning stance. This too is where distinguishing the possibilities of dialogue from discussion is significant. Dialogue used here in its technical sense of ‘building shared understanding’ and not just the interchangeable usage with the words discussion or conversation. Further distinguishing ‘learning’ as something more than drinking from the fire hose of ‘theory’ that usually gets sprayed out at such gatherings and consciously inviting/challenging the group to do something more than ‘the usual.’…
Blending meaningful input with thoughtfully designed reflective dialogue allows participants both to engage material and then broaden the groups thinking in relation to it. I assume an effective process requires a skillful blending of time to create safety for the group to speak well together, thoughtful process questions, and allowing meaningful time to reflect and speak to these questions.
Oftentimes I notice a dominant cultural value toward speed and productivity undercuts effective engagement of the group. To arbitrarily assemble groups of eight and give them eight minutes total to share their ‘most meaningful experience of dialogue’ with one another, is a kind of process violence I find all too common. A critical element of good process design requires walking back through the intended process and outcomes and looking realistically at whether the design can produce the hoped for quality of
group interaction.
I am in the midst of putting the final touches on a design for a large scale conference, and these insights could not have been more timely and useful.
Merlin Mann points to a nice piece on the fragmentation of attention:
A live BlackBerry or even a switched-on mobile phone is an admission that your commitment to your current activity is as fickle as Renée Zellweger’s wedding vows. Your world turns into a never-ending cocktail party where you’re always looking over your virtual shoulder for a better conversation partner.
Recently I facilitated a meeting in which there were so many BlackBerries, I felt like making a pie. Some people had BlackBerries AND cell phones, and both were on.
What struck me was actually how the fragmentation of the room’s attention led to strange behaviour, like having BlackBerry users reminding me that time was tight and we needed to concentrate.
At one point, the most senior person in the group was caught off guard when one of his reports asked him a question that was very useful to the group learning about a good tool for fostering collaboration and communication. I turned to look at him, spoke his name and he looked up at me with a blank look on his face, like the kid in class that was caught reading a note when he should have been answering the math question. I asked him if he would share his experience and he paused and looked embarrassed and finally said “I’m sorry, I was on my BlackBerry.” I didn’t know what to say, so I just looked at him and laughed and said “You are SOOO busted!” That cracked the group up, but the diversion cost the group a learning moment about the tool that never got fully dealt with. The group punished him by putting him in charge of a small piece of the implementation of the decision.
This is shockingly common, and it’s made significantly worse by having the most senior people in the meeting checking out. In the above story, the thought crossed my mind to say that someone could just email him the question and then could speak the answer when he emailed back, but that would have been even more rude.
The deeper worry with this kind of attention splitting is that it prevents a group from ever entering the kind of deep and reflective space that is required to do serious work. If a meeting starts getting complicated, and groany and difficult learning is taking place, good process requires that people stay with the thread and help contribute to an emergent solution. If you are able to check out when you are uncomfortable, or your attention turns to the more shiny task, it makes emergent dialogue nearly impossible. I would rather people exercised the law of two feet and took their presence physically elsewhere rather than leave the impression that they were available to the group conversation. It bugs me too, because I can see a tremendous upside to connectivity in meetings. Participants are able to retrieve information or catch outside experts in real time and bring fresh thinking to hard problems. But I don’t like have that kind of connectivity in the room because I’ve never seen it used responsibly.
It’s really a question of respect and embodied leadership:Be the communication and leadership model you want others to be. How do others deal with this?