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.
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, 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]
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.
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 own RSS feed soe folks can track changes. Feel free to stop by and use what you can.
I’m currently in Prince George BC, with my partner Chris Robertson co-facilitating a two day Open Space gathering for people working on Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder issues in Northern British Columbia. We have close to 200 people here and the dialogue has been amazing.
If you want to join us virtually, follow along with the photos from the event, posted in real time.