Harrison, one of the last times I saw him. I’m on holiday in Portugal about to start a six-day walking trip in the Algarve and I’ve just learned that Harrison Owen died yesterday. His son Barry posted a brief notice on Facebook today. I had a lovely talk with him a couple of weeks ago before I left on this trip. We talked about some things he was reading (he recommended a new edition of “Order out of Chaos: Man’s New Dialogue with Nature” by Ilya Prigogine and Isabell Stengers) and we talked a bit about family and time of …
I’ve been going down a bit of a rabbit hole these past few mornings, looking at some commentary and writing about Kurt Lewin. Lewin, who died in 1947 was a psychologist whose theory and research had a tremendous influence on the modern movements or organizational development, action research, Gestalt theory, change management and group dynamics. To read his writings now is to read a person deeply interested in the complexity of human systems long before there was much language at all available to even discuss complexity. His ideas – or more precisely other people’s ideas about his ideas – have …
Registration for our most recent offering is open. Click here to learn more. Have you been bitten by the complexity bug yet? I think after several years of facilitating, leading or organizing, most folks get curious about how things work. Why did that meeting go that way? How did our organizational culture become so bad despite so many good people here? Why can’t we seem to make a dent in this substance misuse issue in our town? In the arts of working with groups of humans, very few of us have any kind of formal training in how to do …
One of the hundreds of Open Space Technology Principles posters I have used in my time, this one from an Art of Hosting training in Minnesota in 2012, and designed by a team member. NOTE: I edited the title of this to make it clear that I’m not calling Harrison a “shaman,” but rather trying to correct a meme that has been going around which has appropriated his work. There is a post going around on the internet called “The Four Laws of the Shaman” or the “Four Laws of Spirituality.” The four laws are ascribed to some unknown shaman …
In this video, Harrison Owen discusses the chaos that is disrupting the order we take for granted and begins to create a new order and a different world. Harrison has been saying much the same thing for his entire career, starting with his dissertation on Aramaic and associated mythologies and cosmologies. He has been a long-time student of the dance of chaos and order, and his development of Open Space Technology came from this lifelong inquiry. i encountered Open Space first through an event that was hosted by Anne Stadler and Angeles Arien in 1995, and I met Harrison for …