Here is a great description of Open Space as used at the Agile Open Northwest Conference.
This is a simple, inviting description of the process. Well done ANW folks!
near Diest, Belgium
We have begun, and now concluded our first day here at Heerlijckyt, snugged in with 26 mates investigating all sorts of questions about the Art of Hosting as it is manifest and practiced here in Europe, as well as elsewhere in the world.
We spent much of the day experimenting with sensing the collective field, using a combination of methods including a long and juicy opening circle (during which Toke asked the questions “what called you here? What has called us here? and what might we accomplish together?”). This circle was carefully harvested for larger themes. From the circle, we spent time in dyads sensing the collective questions in the field here and then converged some sense of the patterns in the room. After the dyads shared the harvest of the new collective questions, we saw some even deeper meta-patterns. One that came quite clear, was noticed by Sarah Whitely who offered a tarot map for understanding where we currently were as a community. Led by Sarah and Maria Skordialou, we paid some attention to five distinct stations, and we actually held a small collective tarot card reading to sharpen our intuitive sense of the map. Five cards were drawn, one each for what is currently at the heart of things, what is visible and manifest, what is invisible and in our shadow, what is needing to be let go and what is emerging. We then also drew a card for one piece of overall advice. This process was also mapped and harvested and actually served as a nice way to end the day.
All of this is in aid of a deeper exploration tomorrow of the questions that people have brought with them which we will look at in Open Space. It feels like we have framed our collective field of inquiry and now we are moving to seeing how the collective inquiry is supported through the expression of individual questions.
I was participating in the process all day but also trying to operate at a level of trying to see what was happening at the deeper level so that I could harvest a bass note that might be of some use in making sense of the torrent of content. I had a couple of quite powerful personal observations. What follows is quite detailed and drafty, but that is what blogs are for, so sit back with a cup of tea and give me a few minutes of your attention.
First, I noticed a profound sense of how process itself seems to determine the kinds of engagement that a group of people undertakes. What I mean is that as humans we have a deep relationship to various forms of conversation and relationship. Twenty six people sitting on a train engage differently than 26 people in a circle or a world cafe, or an Open Space. Sitting in circle, it’s not uncommon to hear some really big hairy audacious questions such as how can we contribute to the healing of Europe or how can I unite the world or how can the Art of Hosting be of service in activating human potential at the next level of co-evolution. It might be easy on the surface to dismiss these statements as fanciful wishful thinking. After all, upon what basis does a group of 26 people think that it can heal Europe?
But looking past this simple longing of the group to make a difference, I was struck by how much this particular stance was related to the process itself. Human beings have been meeting in circles for most of our time here on earth and we use forms of council like this to make decisions about important questions facing the community. It’s almost as if the fact of sitting in circle contributes to our expanded sense of what is possible, or the influence we might have. Traditionally we would not have sat in council unless there was some chance of affecting the outcome and so the conversation would have gone directly to what was possible to do to preserve the life of the community.
For this group of people, we live in both a small community of practice, but we all operate in a global context. There are people in the room who work with some of the biggest human insitutions ever created, global companies like Siemens and Boeing, decision making bodies like the European Commission or massive community movements like the Estonian White Tulip movement, aimed at national reconciliation and peace. When we talk from these realms of influence and sit in council something seems awakened in us that takes us far beyond what we are likely to accomplish as just 26 people. The potential of the collective is seen and it comes to life as individual aspiration for massive influence.
And this brings me to my second observation which is that this audacious senses of collective self could easily be dismissed as pollyannaish and overly optimistic, or it might be skillfully worked with to make it possible to influence change at the broadest possible level but to preserve the audaciousness by channeling it into a deeper intent and a powerful sense of purpose. Part of being able to do this, it seems to me, is for the collective to have available to itself the resourcefulness to skillfully work with both open curiosity and specific invitation. If you think of these as poles on a spectrum, we can easily map everyone’s wish for our gathering. Thinking of this as a spectrum of being helps to overcome the possible tension of those who appear to have no purpose versus those who seem bent only on looking for results. The spectrum treats these ways of being as resources for the collective.
In our gathering open curiosity is taking the form of untrammeled wonder: “I’m just here willing to see what might happen, not tied to anything, open to any outcomes, happy to wait and see.” Specific invitations arise as statements that invite that energy and attention to specific places like harvest for collective evolution of the group or asking for specific conversations to understand the deeper pattern of the Art of Hosting. Taken on their own, as statements offered by individuals, there is little that is guaranteed to happen. But what if we could marry open curiosity to specific invitation to invite the whole spectrum to amplify itself?
I think to do this, we have to invite those with open curiosity to move to a level of deeper awareness of what is emerging. If you are open, then we thank you for that and we invite you to pay attention to what is emerging in the field and to offer your curiosity mindfully to the specific invitations that arise so that passion and responsibility may be supported. Without deepening curiosity to inviting awareness, people run the risk of simply hanging out and not contributing to responsibility for the collective.
At the other end, those who have specific invitations can deepen their invitations by also sensing what the field is able to support so that those invitations move beyond individual desires to become group aspirations and actual tasks that the collective itself might undertake. This means shifting the offering of those invitations from self-centered place to a community centered place so that those with open curiosity can be caught by the passion that is coming forth.
This probably all seems hopelessly intricate and ambitious. What I’m really doing is taking a very careful look at what the simplest offering might be to catalyse a collective awareness from a circle of individual statements. I think that Open Space Technology actually is the masterful application of this catalysis, but Open Space tends to invite much more grounded invitation because it helps us go quickly to what is possible when we connect passion and responsibility. Action and purpose is often dependant upon the realms of influence of those in the room. Audaciousness can die on the vine, which makes OST very practical and useful for cutting through wishful and magical thinking and getting down to the work at hand.
However, the gift of the circle, as I’ve been trying to say, is that it somehow invites a much bigger sense of ourselves which, if worked with skillfully, can result in an Open Space event later that has a deep and powerful harmonic, a bass note of possibility that is indeed the group’s highest and unspoken aspiration for it’s own work, that transcends what is even known to be possible. In this respect this little spectrum exercise becomes a map out of which hosts might invite deepening awareness to preserve the benefits of “magical thinking” as deep purpose while inviting resources to support the work of collective emergence.
It’s perhaps an esoteric observation about the power of circles, but I’m certainly interested in what you might have to say about it. How do we keep depth, protect and guard it and use it to keep us deeply committed to our work and avoid the trap of getting swallowed in that depth so that we fail to sense more precisely where the opportunity for change and emergence lies? How can we do good work and not lose our deepest calling? How can we honour that call and not get carried away?
I’m back from Bella Coola, and reflecting on the remarkable three days of learning and Open Space we did there.
Saturday, we held a small community Open Space gathering around the issue of what the community needs to do to prepare for assuming full responsibility over child and family services. This is a provocative question in the Nuxalk Nation. The Nation is a strong and independent community and putting children and families in the centre of any conversation brings heart, passion and commitment.
We had a small group of people present for our Open Space. 20 people began the day with us and more came and went. There was a flurry of activity to post sessions in the morning, much of it spurred by pressing community needs. The conversations had a kind of solid adhesion to them that I haven’t witnessed in every community gathering like this. People sat in very well formed circles, and very little bumblebeeing was seen.
There were two incredible pieces of action that flowed from this gathering – one immediate and one long term. The short term project that arose came out of a conversation on the safety of children and youth. At the outset of that conversation a young man, Stephen, told a story about what happened to him the previous night. He was waiting to be picked up by his mother at 2am after being out with friends. While he was waiting a young girl, who he estimated to be between 10 and 12 years old, came out of the bushes, pulled out a crack pipe and started smoking it. Crack and crystal meth are just beginning to make an appearance in the community, but it was the age of this girl that was shocking to Stephen. He told his mom that no matter how he felt the next morning, he was going to that community Open Space to talk about what to do. Stephen’s story inspired the group on the spot to create a network of parent and Elder patrols. Parents signed up to take turns driving around the reserve all night, looking out for kids and helping them get home or stay safe. If it wasn’t possible for them to go home, Elder’s offered to open up their houses so the young people could stay with them until it was safe. The first patrol happened Saturday night.
The long term project involved further development of the idea of a community house that came out of our World Cafe on Friday. A group met to discuss what came next and they committed to open a bank account, begin fundraising and to meet in a week to flesh out a more detailed todo list. As a result of the concreteness of their invitation and willingness to work together, the group raised $260 just by passing a hat in the closing circle, a tangible investment of money that arose very much as a koha, which is the Maori word for what happens when people commit money to an idea at the end of a meeting.
One of the reasons why this Open Space seemed so “adhesive” was that it came at the end of two days of training, and the folks who came through that experience together ended up co-hosting the invitation for the Open Space – by directly inviting two or three other community members to show up on Saturday – and they took responsibility for co-hosting the conversations and the action in the Open Space. We came up with these two concrete projects without even doing any action planning.
As usual I learned much about community and Open Space in this process. The most important thing for me was noticing what happens when a community enters Open Space with some preparation. In the past I have facilitated these kinds of events in a way that was completely self-contained within the Open Space. It has long occurred to me that simply doing that is not leveraging all the potential for leadership and change that is present in a community. I have been thinking for a while about how to combine training and capacity building with Open Space events to maximize this high potential.
On this score, Michael Herman, Julie Smith, Judi Richardson and I developed an approach in 2002 in Alaska that addressed this by holding an Open Space event and then following up immediately with two days of Open Space training to further explore applications of the process and to develop ideas that were started in the Open Space. In Alaska in 2002 we had great success with this approach and Open Space became used fairly widely within the school system, and in some quite surprising places. The advantage of this approach is that the community gets to experience Open Space first, develop ideas and then refine them further.
This alternate approach is based on the work that I am doing with The Art of Hosting community. The Art of Hosting is a training event that covers many aspects of leadership, process design and methodologies and is built around the core of Appreciative Inquiry, World Cafe, Circle practice and Open Space. In wanting to give participants a more realistic experience of Open Space, we have been adding more and more time in the Art of Hosting to the Open Space events, and typically putting them at the end of the three or four days of training. The advantage of this approach is that it begins by building a broader sense of leadership, design and process and then uses Open Space to create the kinds of projects that flow from the learning work. In the context of community-based leadership development, this approach works beautifully, to give people a variety of tools, host conversations that are at times theoretical and at times deeply experiential and to sew it all together with a concrete experience of Open Space which actually gets so-hosted by the community members themselves.
I hope to get back up to the Nuxalk Nation in the not too distant future, to check in on where they are at and contribute where I can. You can contribute too if you like, by donating money to the community house fund, the project which started entirely in Open Space. If you could even spare $10 that would be fantastic, and to have it come from far flung parts of the globe would be an inspiration for the community members working hard to improve the lives of their children and families.
This is what happens when you travel the world with a question: you find teachings in all kinds of unexpected places. There’s a spoiler in here, if you haven’t seen the movie.
Last night my family all enjoyed a night in Vancouver, dinner and a movie. We went to see Bridge to Terabithia, which is a pretty good film about two pre-teen outcasts, Jess and Leslie, who find meaning in each other’s imagination. Together they ease each other into opening minds and hearts to create a fantasy world, and it’s neve clear whether or not the world is becoming real as the movie unfolds. Towards the end of the film Leslie dies – a strange enough occurrance in a children’s movie – and Jess is left alone with the fantasy world he created with his friend.
It’s a strong film with many themes, but as I’ve been carrying around the questions of what it means to harvest in the world, I found it interesting that the movie resonated for me on that level.
One way to think about harvesting is to see it as putting imaginations to use to create meaning in one world so that another world may come into being. In social change efforts, harvesting is most powerful not when it simply documents the shift from one state to another, but when the harvest itself becomes the catalyst for the coming into being of the new world.
In Bridge to Terabithia, Leslie is a storyteller whose words can invoke physical realities. Jess is a talented visual artist who draws the worlds he sees. Together they create their new world, tentatively at first, but later with so much energy that they inhabit it with wild abandon. In the end, after Leslie dies, Jess shares this world with his little sister, who is introduced to the world by crossing a bridge that Jess has built over the creek in which Leslie has died. When they reach the other side, Jess’s sister utters “Terabithia!” and her ability to see and live in the world begins immediately. Her own profound imaginary engagement with Terabithia is a testament to the power of what Jess and Leslie harvested from their creation and experience of the world. It ‘s fascinating to look at the film from this angle, at how the power of Leslie’s imagination, and Jess’s harvest of it literally creates a bridge for Jess’s sister to cross so that she may be fully invited into Terabithia.
I’m quite interested how a multimedia, multimodal harvest of meaning from an experience can facilitate and sustain new levels of consciousness and awareness. In this film, the continuation of the world requires a harvest that envelopes Jess’s sister so that she immediately opens to the power of her own imagination. It’s what every good meeting should be about.