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 life. He asked me for a good story and I told about some work I’m doing with universities and labour unions around culture change and he just riffed off of those, expressing his usual astonishment that no one quite seems ready to adopt the simplicity of Open Space. It was, literally, the message he preached until his dying day.
Harrison was an important mentor in my life, and it’s fair to say that without his ideas in the world and later his friendship and mentorship, I wouldn’t have been on the path I was on, doing what I am doing. In a post I wrote a few weeks ago, I summed up what he meant to me thus:
Harrison is an incredible guy, a deep river of experience and knowledge. His folksy manner and his constant exhortations to simplify one’s facilitation practice don’t come close to giving the full breadth of his life’s work its due. He is a priest, a theologian, a scholar of Near East religion, myth and culture, a former bureaucrat, community organizer, consultant, teacher, and author, and his whole life has only partially been about Open Space. I’m pretty sure he wouldn’t describe himself as a shaman but he was an important mentor in my life. He was the first person to introduce me to complexity theory, to spirit in organizations and to the dynamics of self-organization which transformed my facilitation practice.
So many of us in the Open Space world feel this way about him. I’m sitting today with a reflection on his life in my heart, and I will walk with him in mind this next week across the cliff tops and headlands of southern Portugal, peering out and across the wide Atlantic that he loved so much.
RIP, fella. The space is open.
By way of Peggy Holman, I was pointed to this video of an Open Space meeting recently held in Balama, Liberia. It’s a sweet thing, because Harrison Owen was deeply inspired by the village of Balama where he worked in the 1960s as part of the US Peace Corps. He attributes some of his inspiration for Open Space Technology to his experiences there, working with local folks as they organized and developed their community.
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 or some exotic culture like “Indian spirituality” or “Native American wisdom.” You can visit the links I’ve provided here to get a sense of the text. And, of course, this stuff is all over Facebook, where it gets shared endlessly. The earliest reference to these “Four Laws of a Shaman” I could find is from a Facebook page in 2011.
This kind of thing always gets my hackles up because it is possible that these sorts of sayings are attributable to a person who may be a specific teacher in a specific spiritual lineage or tribal community. Erasing their voice is a kind of colonization, so please don’t share these kinds of unattributed nuggets of wisdom unless you can quote a source.
In this case, however, the source is not a tribal elder from an exotic locale, but is Harrison Owen from Maryland, USA and the “Four Laws” are actually the original four principles of Open Space Technology. Here is one version of these “four laws of a shaman” from the posts:
- “The person who comes into your life is the right person”
- “What happens is the only thing that could have happened”
- “Anytime it starts is the right time.”
- “When something ends, it ends”
Anyone familiar with this blog or Open Space Technology will recognize right away that these are the original four principles of Open Space Technology, to whit:
- Whoever comes is the right people.
- Whatever happens is the only thing that could have.
- Whenever it starts is the right time.
- When it’s over, it’s over.
(And there is a fifth principle that was added within the last decade or so which says “Where ever it happens is the right place” but I’m old skool and the truth is I forget that one all the time)
The original reference for these principles is Harrison’s “Open Space Technology: A User’s Guide, first edition” originally published in 1992. The principles and the law of two feet are outlined in Chapter Five, pp 68-74. Before that, these principles were articulated in the late 1980s and published in the original set of notes Harrison wrote about the process sometime in 1987 or 1988. You can find that document at the worldwide archive of the Open Space Technology community of practice.
Harrison is incredibly generous with his work, and you can find much of his out-of-print work available at the Harrison Owen Library at openspaceworld.org. There is a library of his papers there too.
Sometimes, it is asserted that Harrison got these principles from a Liberian village. This isn’t true. Harrison did a stint in the US Peace Corps in the 1960s and documented village life in Liberia while working on community projects. You can read a beautiful photo essay of his observations in “When the Devil Dances” at the Internet Archive. He never claimed to see Open Space in action there. Rather, he was taken with how the community addressed a complex agricultural issue, and he cut his teeth on designing participatory processes in that work, which is documented in some detail in The Practice of Peace.
The Organizational Transformation conferences he helped run in the early 1980s (documented here) were the first use of the method, specifically at OT3 in 1985. His story of how he came to develop and use the method with many others is documented in his many papers and books, especially Expanding Our Now. He has been interviewed countless times, done TEDx talks and is always up for a chat, so if you want to hear the story from the horse’s mouth, you have abundant opportunity to do so.
Harrison is an incredible guy, a deep river of experience and knowledge. His folksy manner and his constant exhortations to simplify one’s facilitation practice don’t come close to giving the full breadth of his life’s work its due. He is a priest, a theologian, a scholar of Near East religion, myth and culture, a former bureaucrat, community organizer, consultant, teacher, and author, and his whole life has only partially been about Open Space. I’m pretty sure he wouldn’t describe himself as a shaman but he was an important mentor in my life. He was the first person to introduce me to complexity theory, to spirit in organizations and to the dynamics of self-organization which transformed my facilitation practice.
So. The next time you see these “shaman’s laws” shared in your circles, feel free to bring these receipts and give Harrison his due.
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 the first time in 1998 at a one-day session at Simon Fraser University where he sat and taught about chaos and order, self-organization, organizational transformation and Open Space just through telling stories and sending us into a little bit of Open Space. Harrison’s work ignited two major threads in my life’s work: the facilitation of self-organizing dialogue processes, and a fiery curiosity about how complex systems work.
This talk opened a recent gathering of Open Space facilitators on the Power of Love, Not Knowing and Open Space. These are the stories and insights Harrison has been sharing for his whole career. What I love about him is his embrace of the fundamental simplicity of working with complexity and facilitating Open Space. It’s mind-boggling to me (and him) why people seem so predisposed to make Open Space far more complicated than it needs to be. We understand why: it’s about losing control and being unable to deal with the discomfort of uncertainty. Fear, power and ego come into play, and people lose the ability to act resourcefully.
It’s lovely to watch him teaching and encouraging people to do the simple things well and get out of the way of the work that groups of people can do.
Enjoy this video. He’s been a mentor and an inspiration for me for 25+ years. We do indeed love you, Harrison.
The first time I ever experienced Open Space Technology was at the International Association of Public Participation Practitioners in Whistler, BC, Canada in 1995. It changed my life, to be hosted by a small team of beautiful facilitators who took a standard conference and opened space for the 400 of us to spend a day in deep practice, conversation, and community together.
The team was Anne Stadler, Angeles Arrien and Chris Carter. What an introduction to Open Space. I can still remember Anne lighting a candle and placing it at the centre of a huge concentric swirl of chairs. I figure I owe my path in life to the graciousness of Anne’s opening and invitation to Open Space. Over the past 28 years – for half of my life so far – that one experience has set me on my course, and I am forever grateful that I made the decision to go to that conference.
Anne died yesterday at age 92.
We have lost an Elder, a steward, a mentor, and a friend. Someone who always had our backs, someone who never wavered in her support of those who were dedicated to making the world a more humane, creative, and life-affirming world. She called this the “radiant network.” I feel so blessed to have walked a little on this journey alongside Anne’s wisdom, grace, and fierce support.