San Francisco
OSonOS 2008 has begun with Lisa Heft opening up space in a beautiful building at San Francisco’s Presidio this morning for 120 of us from more than 15 countries to get into what Open Space is all about. This is my third worldwide OSonOS and I love these gatherings because I get to hang around with people for three days that I don;t have to explain myself to! That, I think may be a good working definition of a community of practice.
THis one is different for me as I am here with my whole family, and my kids are actively participating. I sat with my seven year old Finn today in a session on facilitating Open Space as a kid. For him I think it was an experiment in what it is like to post a session and see who will come and find out how the whole thing goes. There was a small group of us talking about a number of issues having to do with working with children both in Open Space and facilitating Open Space, and a few insights came to light.
First, when working with kids, it’s important to know that the principles of Open Space will always be pushed to the max, and probably beyond what most adults are comfortable with. We had a story of a gathering that my kids were a part of that was hosted by adults, but in which the outcomes were predetermined and “the best face” was put on the event. Working with kids means whatever happens in the only thing that could have happened and that might also mean that nothing of significance happens. Being okay with this, especially if resources have been sunk into something, can be hard for adults tied to outcomes. Working with kids will always teach you something about your practice.
We heared some good points about the kinds of ways adults need to show up with kids in Open Space, notably around the issue of time rhythms and silence. Kids operate on a different time engine than adults, sometimes speeding ahead, other times slowing down. Often kids won’t speak until they know they are safe and they will silently canvas a circle of their peers to see who might talk first. This can seem interminable to adults who are expecting answers and yet this relationsl field is very important to kids.
We talked too about making sure that spaces are meaningful for kids. If we are doing work that involves kids voices, we need to make sure that these voices will have impact and that we may be prepared to be changed by the experience. Adults can be advocates to kids – even in child-based organizations – to make sure that children’s wisdom is heard.
Finally we talked a little about a real world issue going on in our home community of Bowen Island, where some trees are being taken out of a playground to build an all weather playing field, something Finn is pretty interested in. The need for children to have spaces in which unfettered social self-organization can occur is critical. While there are many forested areas on our island, there are very few in which all the island kids can meet and in which the co-create self-organized worlds. In this sense kids already know how to live and be in Open Space. Helping them to actually run meetings like this might benefit from drawing on these expereinces.
My son really co-convened this session with me and at times he was lost for words. I think for him, there was a little experiment going on: what is it like to call a session? Who will come? How does the power work in this process? He learned a few things about this, including the fact that if you call it, people will come. He also learned about checking in and checking out and knowing that that is okay, but it reminded me that for a wide open learner it may be true that working in Open Space is equally about learning about the content and playing with the process. Fascinating all round.
San Francisco, CA, USA
The annual world Open Space on Open Space is upon us, and I am here with the whole family in San Francisco in anticipation of two and half days of meeting with friends old and new. Tonight Harrison Owen was here making a brief appearance to launch the 3rd Edition of the Open Space Technology User’s Guide, which has been updated with several stories and tweaks to the process that the community has evolved since the last edition, published in the 1990s. It was good to see Harrison again, although ever so briefly, as he was off to perfrom the wedding ceremony for his daughter this coming weekend, so he won’t be with us.
A nice evening reception though down at Fort Mason on the waterfront. Several bloggers are here this year, so I expect to see stuff posted from Viv McWaters, Jeff Aitken, Christy Lee Engle, Doug Germann and Kaliya Hamlin among others. Hopefully we’ll have some connectivity in the conference site and I’ll be able to post the odd reflection or two.
In the meantime, we’ve been here for a few days already, visiting Alcatraz, downtown and around the waterfront. I have some photos up at the flickr site, won’t be labeled for a while though.
As Marc’s conversation has unfolded at teh OSLIST, he dropped this lovely analogy about holding space into the mix today. Here’s what he does when people ask him why they pay him:
Usually I then refer to my memories living in West Africa. We mostly had a night watchman in our garden (in many ways the reason was also to give another person a job). They were always there, sitting under a tree, brewing tea and they were great to have a chat with – they knew everything that happened in the neighbourhood! But they never actually did something. And that was the point: you have a night watchmen BECAUSE YOU WANT THEM NOT HAVING ANYTHING TO DO and you have the great desire that they never ever will need to do anything – that was precisely the reason why you have (and paid!) them! They are “holding the night” – and your space to sleep free from worries. And you assume that their mere presence creates this safe space.That’s always how I understood – and explained – my role and the space that I hold as a facilitator. People (who have experienced African night watchmen) always understood…
Back in April, I got to be a part of one of the best hosting experiences of my life when I joined Tuesday Ryan-Hart, Toke Moeller, Monica Nissen, Phil Cass and Tim Merry and a bunch of others in designing and hosting the 2008 Kellogg Foundation Food and Society Conference. The other day Erin Caricoffe, one of the staff members of the core team we worked with sent out this summary of where we are now:
By all shared accounts, the 2008 Food and Society Gathering for Good Food was a success, meeting planning Team goals of providing a relevant, inclusive, and highly participative event, and in the larger, movement-wide goals of defining where our work currently stands, and where it must go to collaboratively progress towards a healthy, green, fair, and affordable food system for all people.
To help weave our work into the national consciousness, we posed hard questions of self-definition, movement-wide strategic thinking, and personal responsibility within the conference framework. Our speakers supported these questions, challenging participants to be inspired towards change and confident in furthering it. Thoughtfully crafted Learning Journeys enabled many to step beyond their desk-bound days to re-examine and experience the shared core of our work. The technologies of Open Space, Good Food Village Square, and Good Food Cafes shifted us from prescribed idea sharing to permit a more personal stake in not mere talk, but work in the moment, of the moment, with long-term vision. We all took our turn asking attendees to participate more than they had before at such an event; thank you for your creative assistance in making this happen to such great effect.
The gathering intended to provide and ignite a crucible for systemic shift towards deeper, more meaningful connections that will sustain the good of our communities; towards co-creating the bigger picture of the Good Food Movement; and finally, towards experiential co-learning through conversations, visual harvesting, performance poetry, dedicated blogging, and sharing nourishing meals at the table. With defined intentions and shared commitments, our efforts to make it so were strengthened, and many goals met. We sincerely thank you for these efforts, your sharing of time and wisdom. And so shall our steps continue, following this collective lead. Together we will continue”
This gathering’s success is quite obviously an achievement earned through the hard work of many, of you: Planning Team members and our talented core of Art of Hosting facilitators, speakers who came from different locales and different backgrounds, authors who overturn the rocks that drive our knowledge, the maverick leaders who embraced ad hoc strategic planning in leading Good Food Village Square Sessions, the many persevering Learning Journey hosts who gave extra effort in order to connect with dozens of visitors, the hard-working Wild Horse Pass Sheraton crew, and last, but not at all least, the welcoming community of Native American generations who graciously hosted us at a most appropriate and inspired location, allowing authentic, challenging work to take place.
We, the Good Food Movement, are a living, breathing model of diversity, heart, and cooperative engagement for common good. Thank you for your efforts in helping us all realize this, and challenging us to maintain our necessary work!
This work was truly the next level of conference design for us, a completely participatory and challenging gathering and I’m so take with Erin’s description of what happened there.
On the OSLIST, Marc Steinlin posed a few questions that I took a stab at answering:
What means “holding space”? What is the function, if demonstrably one can do without?
The $100,000 question! Several of us over the years have written things on it (I wrote a whole book trying to understand it) but it is an elusive process. And I think it changes with the scale and size of the group AND most importantly with the pre-existing depth of their own relationship.
If I was to generalize I would say that holding space means helping the group find its highest potential realized. For some groups, in some contexts this might be a very controlling kind of thing and for other groups not so much. In my expereince where there is a deep underlying and pre-existing architecture of relationships and collaboration, there is very little an individual can do to control the outcome, so getting out of the way seems the best option. Lately I’m learning a lot about working with fields of learners or people engaged in large scale and longer term change. What I’m learning is that it takes a field to hold a field, as my late friend Finn Voldtofte once said. In other words, at large levels of scale within organizations or communities, the act of holding space is actually all about attending to the relationships of the group of people that are holding the deepest intention for the work. In an organizational development context this means that the core team spends a great deal of time working on its own relationships and in so doing, they are able to hold space for the bigger field of learning.
And then having said all of that, I think there is an art to intuitively knowing how much or how little to “hold.”
Or is it really that the group as a whole can hold space (which seemed to be the case)? Any group?
Yes a group can hold its own space, but not any group. My hunch is that we can let go into groups like this when there is at least a minimal form of relationship in place. How much or how little is immeasureable, but you can sense whether a group has that capacity or potential if you let go of your expectations for the role of facilitator.
Why do we really need any facilitator throughout the event?
I am working a lot these days with the chaordic path, the idea that there is a way forward if we dance between chaos and order. In that respect I think the facilitator can play a valuable role in brining minimal elegant structure to chaos so that the conditions for self-organization might be met. At it’s most basic level, this structure looks like or is an invitation, a calling question that taps passions and responsibility Once passion and responsibility are tapped, the group can look after itself.
And consequently under which conditions can we dispense with it?
Most of our lives are spent without facilitators helping us be around other people. We can learn a lot from those situations. If you engage in a little appreciative inquiry project on your own life, you might remember stories about times in your life when you experienced great strides without a facilitator.and then harvest the key conditions from those stories.
What is the risk? Can this go totally wrong?
The risk is always that it won’t work, that a group won’t discover its highest potential. And although whatever happens is the only thing that could have (and that means you need to pay attention to the space to hold at the outset), if there is much at stake and the group finds itself unable to work without some form and leadership, the stake will be lost, as will the opportunity. But in complex living systems, there is no such thing as totally wrong anyway – everything that happens is food for everything else. If however you have an expectation that there is a right and a wrong result, there is always the risk that a group might acheive the wrong result.
In my experience, it pays to create the conditions in which the host team and the group itself understands this approach to complex systems and self organization. so that you are operating with a learning environment rather than a right/wrong dichotomy.
That’s the extent of my thinking this morning.