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.
Sun and clouds above the Strait of Georgia
I was listening to this podcast this morning, a conversation between Krista Tippet and John Polkinghorne regarding the marriage of quantum physics and religion (which incidently is a subject Ken Wilber has also taken on recently in a podcast). It is an excellent conversation and I found myself grooving along with the theme of the universe as both predictable to some extent and unpredictable at the same time. Polkinhorne makes the analogy with clocks and clouds, saying that the sun rises and sets and we can predict when that will happen using Newtonian physics (and clocks), and also there is much uncertainly in the world, which he calls “clouds:” unpredictable possibility, structure on the edge of chaos and order.
My mind got busy and I started thinking about how peering into the sky, one can see this all the time. The sun, stars, moon and planets that we see in the sky can be predicted and clocked. The clouds that move across them are full of potential and beauty and complexity and there is no way we can account for or predict the specific form of any of them.
And then I began to notcie the sky itself – clear, transparent, irrelevent to both the objects and the clouds and yet the medium in which both exist, and I began to think that this is a good model for thinking about facilitation. As facilitators we hold space for both order and chaos to play at the same time. We are barely noticable when we are working well, and when people gaze into our container they see only the play of clouds or the precise edges of stars and moon, and forget that they are also looking at the sky itself.
Facilitating as sky means opening THAT big and inviting both clouds and sun to play with one another and to admit the possibility for amazing and astonishing beauty to arise from their coexistence. It is the essence of holding space in chaordic process.
I have been listening this evening to a podcast (.mp3) by Buddhist teacher James Foster on the single most important question in any spiritual path: so what?
That’s it. That is the question. It is neither a trivial question nor one that is completley cavalier. In fact it is a profoundly important question in very many realms and it is the utter foundation of the grounding practices that take facilitation, leadership and work from the esoteric to the real.
So heading into a week of teaching, I think I will anchor a lot of what I am doing around this question and play with the way in which the energy of this simple inquiry grounds everything.
[tags]James+Foster, Buddhism[/tags]
I am thoroughly enjoying the podcasts of Alan Watts’ talks at the archive of alanwatts.com. Today, on the bus into Vancouver I listened to part four of “Seeing Through the Net” in which Watts talks about trust and control.
The essence of his argument is this: in Judeo-Christian societies, humans are said to be born with sin, and are therefore inherently untrustworthy; to be precise, humans are unable to rely on their own judgements to make good decisions and decisions for the good. And so the way to deal with a population of largely untrustworthy neer-do-wells is to create an eleborate system of controls in society to ensure that behaviour is managed and the chaos doesn’t get too overwhelming.
In contrast, Watts says, many societies, including traditional Chinese society and, I would argue, many First Nations societies see humans as essentially good and capable and trustworthy. If you can view humans like this, then you can see a room full of people as a roome full of potential, and an organization of people is one essentially capable of doing good in the world. All you have to do is trust these inherent capacities.
This control issue crops up everywhere. If humans are essentially untrustworthy then we need laws to keep the peace and agendas to keep them on topic. We need rules, regulations, measurements, standards and assessment and evaluation criteria that judge the largely untrustworthy human against the perfect ideal, in order to see how badly they failed to achieve perfection.
The kicker for me in listening to Watts comes when he says that the problem with this logic is that if you believe that humans are inherently untrustworthy, then you cannot possibly trust your own thoughts about that. It takes you into a strange loop that is inescapable. On the other hand if you begin with the assumption that humans are good and can be trusted, you can trust that assumption and engage others in your work and adventures.
It seems to me that this is a critical part of the infrastructure that underlies how we choose to be together in organizations and communities. If we can trust each other, then we can trust that any sticky place we come too will be resolved by the people we are with. If we can’t trust each other, then we can’t trust ourselves first of all, and the world becomes a sad place full of controls and statistics and punishment and devoid of the life and creativity and passion that we see in places where people are truly alive.
I try to work with people who believe in people and who trust them to find their way. It just sank in today a little deeper how profoundly this either/or really is. So here is a renewed call for a practice of deep and radical trust in the person sitting next to us. To the extent that we can trust them and validate their agency and potential contribution as a human being, we can do the same for ourselves. And vice versa.
[tags] alanwatts, trust, control[/tags]
I have recently come into a set of three nice 1/2lb juggling balls from Higgins Brothers (“The Physical Intelligence People”).
Teaching myself to juggle has been a great learning practice. I first learned how to juggle in 1984, with three tennis balls, in my parents basement. The flow kicked in while I was watching the CBC news magazine program “The Journal” as Barbara Frum was interviewing the Ethiopian foreign minister about the famine in his country. That is how sharp my awareness was that evening: I can remember exactly what was happening when I finally got three balls to cascade.
Fast forward about 20 years and here I live on this island with a whole bunch of homeschooled kids around me. One of them, my 15 year old friend Calder Stewart is an excellent juggler and a good juggling teacher. And his dad, Paul, is even better. Paul juggles all the time. On the ferry, waiting for the bus, in the line up at the store…and he always has a new trick or two that he is working on.
And then, my friend Ashley falls in love with Thomas Arthur who is the best space sculptor I have ever seen and he comes to visit with Ashley and shows me a few things. So I’m a lucky guy. Lots of teachers around, lots of people better than me and a nice set of good tools.
And all of that goes to facilitating flow, because for me that is what it is all about. Keeping three balls in the air, and making them do things like change direction or bounce off walls is a beautiful, accessible physical flow practice for me. When we reach flow, we are more likely to practice, and when practice more, we reach flow more.
Calder and I were talking today and he was saying that he drives his dad crazy because he never “practices.” I told him that I never “practice” either. I just play. All the time. Whether it is music or juggling. I never pick up my flute ormyt jugglign balls just to practice. I always pick up my tools to play to get to flow. Play as practice, practice as play.
Maybe one day I’ll get like this. The thing to notice about this video is not the technique (which is astounding) but the flow he is in. Imagine being in THAT spot? Wow.
Wait till Thomas posts a video of his work sometime and you’ll see someone who does even more amazing stuff with a much simpler approach.