After a couple of conversations around the practice workshop I am offering in two weeks, and a lot of midnight interruption on his part Michael Herman has distilled the thinking again on the practices of Open Space.:
1. Being Open-Hearted – not just the act of opening, but the practice of being that way, resting in that state. The tool here is experience, our own life experience. The workshop conversation is about the life experiences that have opened our hearts, in gentle or devastating ways – and how we’ve managed to maintain various states of openness, in spite of everything. The product here is Body.2. Telling Visionary Stories – not just any storytelling, but the practice of speaking of our visions, of putting words and giving voice to the scattered data, fuzzy patterns, and blurry sensations we have of what we want and what might now be possible. The tools here are maps and languages. Every department, team, family and function has its own set of words and pictures to hold them together. The more languages we know, the bigger and broader the story we can spin, the more people we can invite. The workshop conversation here is about Inviting Organization, a map and language for maps and languages. The product is Invitation, Organization in the sense of Order.
3. Offering (and Holding) Space – the offering is important, no push, no grab, just letting what we have, our attention and our space, be there for the taking, for the use and support of what wants to happen in front of us, and all around us, within the circle of space that we circle and name as “us” and “our time together.” The tool(s) here are structures, but specifically those structures that support movement, rather than restrict it. Rules, if you will, that say what we can do, rather than what we must or must not do. Shapes of organization that create, and offer, choices. The workshop conversation is about space and support for movement. The product is Organization, Invitation in the sense of Space for Movement.
4. Grounding� making it real. making it touch, as impact, and imprint, a difference. and making touchdowns. score! making tracks, traction, and action. taking the steps, in the space, aligned with the vision, as guided by an open heart. showing up. on the ground. The tools are actions, steps, or perhaps gifts. The workshop conversation might be about gifts and giving. Assets and Exchange. Self and Others. Ground. Ground that is bigger, less theoretical, more sensational than Common Ground. More like Ground of Being. Which brings us back to the first practice, and how we are being “Aaaahhhhh”.. and the Product is Peace.
This is going in the ever simpler practice guide, and this is the fundamental structure of the workshop.
I’m with him on the idea that we need to get this into a book pretty soon.
There is still space in the workshop by the way, which is being held near Nanaimo on Vancouver Island.
There is a great flowering of dialogic facilitation training this month around these parts in southern British Columbia and northern Washington State. First Peggy Holman and Tom Cato are offering an Appreciative Inquiry training in Seattle from October 18-21.
Following that, Toke Paludan Moeller and friends will be right here on Bowen Island offering the excellent Art of Hosting gathering which I can highly recommend. That workshop will run October 30 to November 3 which is a great time to be here on our island, as we celebrate Hallowe’en as a quasi-national holiday. That workshop will also feature an alumni gathering that I’ll be at on November 2 and 3.
Finally, you can top off your learning month with an Open Space practice workshop offered by myself and Wendy Farmer-O’Neil in Nanaimo from November 15-17.
I’ve been facilitating groups for as long as I can remember, going back probably 20 years to high school when I ran both informal and organized youth groups with my peers. It has probably been about twelve or thirteen years ago that I started to actually pay attention to what I was doing. But only in the last five or six years, as I have been facilitating full time, have I noticed a deepening in my practice.
Work as practice. And by practice I mean something akin to a spiritual practice, whereby one undertakes a life of value and meaning through living in a particular way. When I feel my facilitation practice deepening, I notice that what I do is becoming more and more aligned with who I am.
I am starting to see just how important that is in the work I do with groups. When I was first starting out, I used to collect “tools” for working with groups. I had what amounted to a cookbook of ideas for working through different processes. I got some success in simply following the instructions and helping the group get to where they wanted to go. For most groups, and perhaps even a lot of facilitators, this is enough. It certainly served my work for a number of years.
The thing that changed that, and caused me to deepen my practice, was noticing what happened when things went wrong. Occasionally groups strayed far from the expectation I had for them and when the movie departs from the script, the facilitator’s REAL work begins. In these situations What I noticed was my own anxiety and panic about being in the unfolding chaos. I had very little idea what to do, and on a couple of occasions, things just went very wrong.
In reflecting on these experiences I realized what I was lacking was chaordic confidence, a term I appropriated from my friend Myriam Laberge. Chaordic confidence describes the ability to stay in chaos and trust that order will emerge. It’s a subtle art, but it is essential to working with groups who are themselves confronting chaos. If you can stay in the belief that order will emerge from what Sam Kaner calls “The Groan Zone” then the group has something to hitch its horse to, so to speak. But if you are married to your tools, and things go off the rails, you feel like a fish out of water, and you flop around unable to deal with the uncertainty around you. I’ve seen it happen – we probably all have – and it’s not pretty.
Developing chaordic confidence is more than acquiring more tools. It is about integrating an approach to life and work that is anchored in a a set of principles and values that serves our clients. For me these values include believing in the wisdom of the group, trusting that chaos produces higher levels of order and seeing conflict as passion that can be harnessed in the service of progress.
I began looking at some of the tools and processes and approaches I was using and started to realize that the things that worked for me and that brought a better experience to my clients, were processes rooted in the same values that I try to live. This weblog,tagged as “living in open space” is largely about that journey to live and work with the principles of Open space Technology – principles that amount to creating a practice of invitation. Living a life of invitation is a blast.
And there is more. My repetoire of approaches is expanding into a full range of what Toke Paludan Moeller calls “hosting practices.” And as I adopt and work with things like the world cafe and appreciative inquiry, I realize that the values and principles underlying those processes feel authentic to me. When I use those approaches to working with groups, my clients are getting ME, and not just a set of tools. I try to bring my whole self to this work now, with a large dose of chaordic confidence rooted in principles and values that link what I do with who I am. Doing and Being meet in the board room or the retreat centre.
We facilitators don’t talk much about this stuff, but I think it actually preoccupies a lot of our time and thinking. My own preparation for group involves many hours of design and reflection on process and principles so that I can go to work offering the highest level of service to the people with whom I am working. And for me, this means reflecting on what is core to my life and work.
So this is a long winded way of offering some insight into facilitation practice, perhaps mostly for those who are new to this path and who are realizing, as I am, that there is a life time of learning about oneself involved in this work. So as a service to those who might be interested in developing this deeper connection between life lived and tools used, I offer a set of links to principles underlying the processes I work with (and some I don’t work with!) in groups and communities. I offer these up both as a guide to group work and as a compendium of principles and teachings about living. See what you think…
Principles of process and life
- Open Space Technology
- Appreciative Inquiry
- Dialogue
- Circle
- World Cafe
- Dynamic Facilitation
- Chaordic principles
- Four fold way
My recipe book is changing. It’s no longer about tools for group work, but is instead a collection of teachings about living a true and good life of service to heart and community.
Whale to human transformation mask (Haida)
From Civilization.ca
Harrison Owen, the guy who invented Open Space Technology, in replying to my post about stories, put some words around it � gave me the story in fact � and so I realize now that the reason I love practicing OST is that it really does invite an organization or a community to embody a new story about itself – or to rediscover very old ones. Harrison wrote:
There used to be a day when the power of these deep stories was appreciated, but in recent times they are dismissed with the light thought that they are �just a story.� And of course we all know that only the �facts� will do. And when it comes to myths, these are not only dismissed, but dissed. Worse than a story, myth now means lie and falsehood. How the world changes. And of course, for enlightened people such as ourselves, we have long since thrown off the bondage of myth. How sad. And we never really do � throw it off, that is. We simply develop new ones, and they of course, are understood to be The Truth, or better yet Scientific Truth. But it is still a story, now dressed up in different clothes. We call them �Theories� � but at the end of the day, these Theories are simply likely stories which help us interpret our world. So our essential nature hasn�t changed � we are still story tellers whose life expectations are shaped by the stories we tell. Myth by any other name. What is different now is that the formative power of these tales is somehow out of our awareness. And when the stories are warped, distorted or partial � the world and our space in that world is distorted and shrunk. Of course, we could tell a different story. . .And I think that new story creation is a major part of what happens in Open Space. But it is not so much telling a story as being a story.
This is really important in a lot of the places I work. In indigenous communities and other places where colonialism has done its work, the story of how and what we should be is so deeply informed by the colonial culture that it is very rare that an Aboriginal organization or community actually gets to embody and manifest an identity that is NOT constrained by the colonial story. In these communities of course this is most visibly seen by the way local First Nations governments organize community meetings by setting the room up as if it is a school room, with the experts at the front and the masses in rows of chairs. Even if the government is trying to embody an inclusive style by holding consultative meetings with the community, I often wonder if the form of the meeting, the process itself is doing more harm than good. And when the subject of the meeting has something to do with the recovery of cultural resources, or land rights or something else that is so closely aligned to indigenous identity, then it school-room type public meetings become almost too painfully ironic for me.
As groups working in Open Space, we get to try out a new story, and this is largely the process benefit of the one-off or event-based OST meeting. I realize now that I usually close these meetings by inviting people to notice how the quality of the room has changed, how relationships have changed, how the same people we looked at in the opening circle suddenly seem different after only a few hours together. The people haven’t changed of course, but our stories about them and about how we can relate to them, have changed. It’s nice to leave people with a question in their minds about how that change took place and how easy it might be to recreate it.
In that sense OST is a powerful tool for decolonization and healing in communities – that has largely been my experience. Some people fall into OST like it is a feather bed – they just seem to enfold themselves in the dynamics. Others find it hard going, and some hate the process. And still others, and I count many of the “results-based”cynics among them, change and transform and open their eyes to new possibility.
Here on the west coast of North America, many indigenous communities have stories of transformation. You may have seen elaborate transformation masks that feature one animal splitting in two and another coming forward. Those new creatures come forward fully formed from within the original being. The dances and stories that accompany these masks talk about a time in the world when animals and spirits and humans could change easily from one form to another. It is a reminder of both the interrelated nature of all beings and the ancestral time when these happened regularly.
For me too though it is also a reminder that the story of transformation lives very powerfully in these communities and cultures. Whenever we talk about transformation here on the coast, I invite these stories and see what they can offer us about transformation of our organizations and ways of doing things and perspectives about work, results and process. Often they invite us to uncover the real core story that lies fully formed beneath the unconscious exterior.
Recovery of these tools and stories is critical to recovering authentic expressions of community and organizations that nestle naturally within the indigenous context. Because after all, at a very deep level, indigenous cultures and world views are still here and still alive although they may be glazed over by the patina of a century or more of contact, sharing and transcendence.
Open Space invites us to go deep and rediscover the foundations that inform all of our process work and which, in the end, does get results. So it becomes an elegant BOTH/AND thing. We can foreground parts of the contemporary “results-based” story that help us do work and “make things happen,” and we can also choose to foreground the stories that show us how we live in relation to one another and to practice living and working in full acknowledgement that our lives are dependant on those connections.