Michael Herman started thinking through the practices of Open Space again and yesterday we had a good conversation about the not-practices of Open Space. He has blogged about them here and here, trying on different words and language and making a case (:-)) for various iterations. Briefly, these not-practices, or anti practices are: Analyzing as the opposite of appreciating (and opening) Protecting, defending and facilitating as the opposites of inviting Problem solving and fixing as the opposites of supporting (and holding) Accounting and making a good case as the opposite of making good (grounding) For me these are important because …
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 …
A piece of the mural from “The Gathering“ I don’t usually blog news, but this has a direct correlation to some work I did last year with some incredibly inspiring youth and it’s shocking in its implications. Last year I facilitated an Open Space event as the concluding act of a brilliant rights-based monitoring project co-hosted by the City of Vancouver. The idea of the project was to use the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child as a framework for looking at how well “duty bearers” were upholding human rights in Vancouver. Now this is no police state, …
Everyone wants action – that’s the current business buzzword. Dialogue and conversation seem fine “but they have to focus on action.” It’s almost growing tiresome to hear it. The problem with the mantra is that people rarely have any idea of what action really looks like. Very few people think through to the personal responsibility THEY might take in animating action. Even less see conversation and dialogue AS action. But today in my email box, comes confirmation that action is intimately connected to dialogue and when passion and reposnibility come together, real things happen. Back in the fall, my business …
As I have been updating my website and moving things around I have finally gotten to re-organizing the Open Space Resources page. The page now contains resources on the nuts and bolts of of Open Space and deeper learning organized by practice area. There are also links to articles, books, stories and internet resources to support practice and learning about Open Space. I’ll continue to update the page (having it in a wiki makes that a LOT easier) and I’ll be adding a lot more stories of my own. I’m also looking at giving that page it’s …