One of the most incredible application of Open Space Technology I have ever seen was the Giving Conference that was sponsored by Phil Cubeta and convened and facilitated by Michael Herman with an assist from me, It started something that has flowed out all over the place, and the story has been retold in many places, most recently on Phil’s blog The World We Want
Phil challenged me, at his other blog Wealth Bondage to put together a small manifesto on the world I want. As it relates to philanthropy, open space and democracy, here are a few thoughts:
- Spurred on by a number of ideas, books and thoughts, we can convene local conversations about giving. These conversations need to invite a huge diversity of people, from many different political, economic, social and cultural types to engage around these ideas. We need givers and activists to be in attendance as partners and peers. We need bloggers to be there to witness the power of the story and to tell it to the world. We need thinkers and visionaries to challenge us forward and we need tech people to design and implement the network supports that can emerge and serve us in the moment.
- Connected to one another by appreciative effort, we invite engagement and local action around the world/nation/community we want, and tie our passions to responsibilities, made easier by doing things together in networks, self-organized around what we love and what we are prepared to steward.
- Supported by local networks and conversations face to face and the ever increasing intimacy of global networks served through the web, we find local expression for our action but together contribute to an open source world of solutions and designs for people and places that are stuck.
- Spurred on by what is behind us we make good on our promises and what is budding in our work and use micro-philanthropy to leverage invitations to more open space events, more engaged conversations and more change. Small change becomes big news and yet the money amounts stay small, and the efforts stay local but the scale takes over. Imagine if Wikipedia were not a reference work but a change effort. Imagine if every hour spent working on that was spent working for the world we want. And imagine if we could choose the pieces to work on, contributing where we can, unafraid to make mistakes and muddle through and sense the success with nothing to lose and everything to gain…
I’m up for it. How about you?
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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 thy help us to throw the practices of Open Space into high relief. I would say that “business as usual” highly values analysis, protection and defense of decisions and turf, problem solving and fixing (especially in the consulting world) and accounting and making a case as the “desired outcome” of all of this work. One of the reasons I have become so disenchanted with traditional strategic planning for example is that it proceeds from this particular world view:
- Analyse the problem
- Protect the enterprise, turf, or project from encroachment from the environment
- Fix any problems that might be around
- Measure what you have done and use it to make a business case or a best practice.
My problem with this is that it works at creating and maintaining boundaries, and rarely does anything happen. This is a common complaint about the modern work world and traditional conferences and meeting. Nothing seems to happen, but at least if we can make a good case, we can save some of the effort.
Sometimes that is useful, but I think in a world where the work of making good is the highest calling (no matter what enterprise you are in), the Open Space practices offer a way to do more effective planning:
- Appreciating the resources and assets that we have by viewing them as being of multiple use and increasing value, and being open to other resources
- Inviting choices to participate, join and work together so that people come together in a way that is more like a fellowship and less like a project team or even a community of practice
- Supporting connections between people and enterprises which means opening the boundaries of structure to find solutions from outside and allow order to self-organize and finally;
- Making good things happen and seeing the results spin out into the world in ways that you cannot control nor foresee, nor scarcely measure.
The efficacy of the Open Space worldview is evident in the difference between proprietary software development and the Open Source movement, for example. In the proprietary world (closed space worldview) one analyses the market and the need, defends the company and product from market encroachment by copyrighting it, takes full and exclusive responsibility for fixing, problem solving and debugging, and sells the thing by making a case for why your should use it through marketing and so on. In fact much of consumer culture is based on the fact that poorly working things have better crafted marketing messages. The quality is misplaced. Look at beer ads for example.
In the open source world, we appreciate what is out there, listen to what people want and invite each other to play. The invitation extends right through to bug fixing and problem solving. Anyone can play: you can code solutions or offer to pay someone to do it for you and invite others to incorporate your fixes. Instead of protecting code, it is released into the community, supported through places like Sourceforge and what is made is a good product. And from a good product, which in this case is given away, good things happen. Non-profits for example find themselves better able to meet their stated purpose in the world because they are using Open Office and therefore not spending huge sums of money on licensing.
So this is the value of seeing the not-practices of Open Space (if you can think of a better term for them let me know). They throw some more light on the benefits of what I call the Open Space worldview, and they help describe the reasons why Open Space is not a generally accepted way of doing business, even in progressively structured communities of practices.
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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 all the time without any thought to its origins or mechanics.
I’m now coming to realize that Open Space does indeed fade away, or at least fades into the background when my use of the process dissolves into practice. If anything, this long journey into articulating and understanding the four practices of Open Space has been an effort to understand what I’m learning about organizations, communities, leadership and passion in Open Space and applying that learning throughout my life and work.
Dissolving into practice. That is the essence of why this stuff matters. Some of the participants we had with us here on Bowen Island a couple of weeks ago reported coming to learn about the mechanics of Open Space and leaving with a deeper knowing of how space can be opened everywhere. That is what we are after: cultivating the practices of open space so that it can happen everywhere, at any time and in many different guises. For me, sometimes this takes the form of an Open Space Technology meeting, but there are something like 345 days a year when I am NOT in an Open Space meeting, and yet I’m still practicing.
Michael and I continue to look for ways to make this story accessible and practice-able as we deepen our exploration of these ideas. In the past we have talked about the four practices as Opening, Inviting, Holding and Grounding. This language still holds, and in fact a number of different words and concepts are useful, because these four words describe practice areas in which many distinct practices can be gathered.
After working through the fire of a workshop and some fantastic conversations, we have refined the ore a little more and we are now using the following descriptions:
- Appreciating: noticing what we have, what’s good, what’s easy and possible to develop, what wants to be born. This is an area where our individual practices incloude opening our hearts, cultivating compassion for others and finding ways to join ourselves to the work through connecting purposes.
- Inviting Choice: When we invite, we invite people to join us and in the act of doing so they choose to be our allies. This is profound, because when people choose to be with us, to “live in truth” with us as Vaclav Havel would say, then our purposes are joined and our work becomes meaningful and important. Creating conditions that invite choice is the essence of leadership in Open Space leading to…
- Supporting Connection: which is the way we help each other, once joined, to do the work.. WE bring resources, time, attention, help and put it to work to support evolving and changing structures that arise and fall away to be useful exactly when they are needed. The essence of supporting connection is a complex world is in letting go of control, holding space for new things to emerge and supporting the energy when the do emerge.
- Making Good: this is the logical outcome. When we are in alignment, and our purposes are joined and our connections supported, we ground all of that by making good. Making good looks like better, improved, peaceful, powerful, deeper, happier, healthier. All kinds of organizations have making good as their focus, and within those organizations, people making good will find ways to continue lending their time and attention to the work at hand. When work becomes about something else, it turns into drudgery and control and compulsion are the only ways to keep people around. So we make good on promises, responsibilities, commitments and we make good on fulfilling our purpose in the world.
We’re ploughing away on lots more writing and thinking about this. I reckon there’s a book in it at some point.
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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, and youth are considerably freer in Vancouver than they are in many other places in the world, but there are still some glaring examples of rights violations that go on. Police and transit security personnel often violate youth rights and, much more disturbingly, the child welfare system has come in for some harsh condemnation of late. Economic and social rights are often ignored and youth are generally outside of the civic engagement process. And that one, ironically, has just gotten worse.
The project I was involved in was beautifully conceived and executed by sara kendall and a number of amazing partners who trained youth facilitators and held focus groups around the city. At the end of the project, youth came together for a weekend to prepare a performance and hold an Open Space as a way of reporting out on their work and engaging various levels of government nad others in moving forward on solutions stemming from the project’s recommendations.
One of the partners in the process, and the host at the City of Vancouver, was the Child and Youth Advocate, Sheila Davidson, a wonderfully committed woman who has youth issues right on the skin of her heart. It was her position and office that was eliminated this week (possible linkrot). The City “saved” $150,000 in the axing, but the costs are going to be huge. In the linked article, NDP child and family services critic Adrian Dix says “One of the reasons you need this, especially in Vancouver, is for those youth living on the street. They benefit the most. I’ve attended events by [youth advocate] Sheila Davidson’s group where I would meet young people you’d never see at any other civic gathering.” He’s talking about our Open Space weekend, among others perhaps. Here’s a photo of him in intense dialogue with youth that day.
Today, some of the folks involved in the rights monitoring project released a press statement that said, in part:
It is disturbing and inexcusable that the Child and Youth Advocate has been cut during a time of well-known critical need for exactly what the Advocate’s position was fulfilling,” says Sara Kendall, a Vancouver youth and community facilitator who coordinated the rights-based monitoring project. “The youth community and children’s service providers are outraged. There is a single, viable response here: the Office of the Child and Youth Advocate needs to be reinstated.”
The work of the Child and Youth Advocate was instrumental in connecting children, youth, service providers and City government for the insurance of a healthier and safer city for young people. The erasure of this position marks the dismissal of the importance of young lives in Vancouver.
“Vancouver has previously shown leadership in investing in the lives of its most vulnerable, and most highly valued citizens, the children and youth who live here,” states Caitlin Padgett, the City’s first Youth Advocate Mentor. “Services that are now taken for granted and considered irreplaceable exist because of the work of advocates who spoke up for children and youth.”
Along with the position of the Child and Youth Advocate, the entire budget of the office was eliminated, including: The Youth Advocate Mentor, a part-time position that was the only one of its kind in Canada, mandated to directly link the voices of youth communities and City policy; a Child Care Advocacy strategy; community consultations addressing youth-police relations, a youth-police working group; Child and Youth Rights monitoring reporting.
“Young people, particularly those marginalized, rarely have the opportunity to meaningfully contribute to the decisions and policies that impact their lives,” maintains Sheena Sargeant, Executive Director of YouthCO AIDS Society, a non-profit organization that provides support services to youth living with HIV/AIDS. “With the decision to cut the office of the Child and Youth Advocate, City Council has directly impacted the quality of life of many children, youth, and their families; they have removed one of the very few ways that communities and service providers can be seen and heard.”
If you want further information, or you want to help find a way to meet this now unmet need in Vancouver call Caitlin Padgett at 604-762-4520 or Sheena Sargeant at 604-338-9697.
And for a beautiful photo gallery of the Open Space day, showing shots of the youth at work and some of the art they created, visit my Flickr gallery of the day.
[tags]Vancouver[/tags]
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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 partner Lyla Brown and I conducted a series of Aboriginal engagement meetings for the Victoria Urban Development Agreement process (the report is here). As part of the work, we held an Open Space Technology meeting with more than 100 community members to discuss and implement ideas that had been raised in a series of focus groups. One of the conversations at the Open Space gathering was on food security, and the results of that work have now borne fruit. Today, I received a press release in my inbox from one of the community agencies that took up the implementation challenge and ran with it:
Aboriginal Group Promotes Food Security as humble start in reducing Aboriginal poverty as Big Business
VICTORIA – Inner City Aboriginal Society (ICAS), by promoting an aboriginal community dialogue on food security, is actively working towards reducing poverty as big business.
As a reaction to the fact that an estimated 50% of the street-homeless community in Victoria are aboriginal – and that current funded strategies are focused on charity based or service provision approaches – ICAS has organized itself to encourage a move towards a third option. ICAS is facilitating a series of Aboriginal Sharing Groups on Food Security at the end of March to provide information about food security issues, to explore cultural aspects of food security and to set some direction for further action. The discussions on food security represent – for those in the Inner City Aboriginal Society – the restoration of economic justice by transitioning the aboriginal community from victim to dignity status. Bruce Ferguson, one of the founding directors of ICAS expressed his opinion on the Aboriginal Sharing Groups on Food Security.
“Imagine if 50% of the budgets of all the downtown service providers and dedicated funds for the street community went to aboriginal people to empower ourselves….need I say more. Empowerment of the marginalized cant happen over night, but at least with taking back the dignity of feeding ourselves, we can one day reach equality with other Canadians…”
“The work of ICAS in food security dialogue will provide a challenge that moves the aboriginal community away from being objects of charity and-or clients of service providers towards strategies and languages that talk about empowerment and self-reliance” adds Rose Henry, long time aboriginal activist and recent candidate for City Council.
The Aboriginal Sharing Groups will be held between March 22nd and April 3rd.
Action is passion bounded by responsibility. Action becomes easier when there is a strategic architecture for acting. That architecture is forged in the fire of conversations about what matters, where people create relationships, connections and shared vision about what might be. When that action infrastructure is laid down, acting becomes fairly basic. When that architecture can be created from the bottom-up and then used by those who actually created it, then the action becomes both efficient and powerful.
The interesting thing about this series of community conversations on food security is that they have been taking place outside of the official program of the Victoria Agreement. The agreement itself is not yet signed, and there are many planning conversations going on behind the scenes to tranisition the structure of the inter-governmental relationships from working groups to action groups. While this has been happening, Inner City Aboriginal Society and its partners have been leveraging the strategic architecture that was formed in the community Open Space event to put this topic and approach in front of the community. They are seeking solutions to the problem that avoids a dependant relationship on governments and “charities” and in doing so, they are planning, organizing and meeting without government or charitable support.
Leadership, even in business, is about walking your talk and both creating and leveraging the strategic architecture to find a way to take responsibility for what one loves. ICAS is showing the way here.