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.
There has been an interesting discussion about outcomes at the OSLIST, the listserv for the international community of Open Space practitioners. It began with a challenge from a cynic who asked “show me one instance where Open Space has resulted in a better world or a better product. ” That sort of line.
My initial response to the question was, as it always is, to deconstruct the notion of “results” and “outcomes.” Process work of any kind is by definition, process work. The outcomes are not always immediately tangible because process work is not the same as manufacturing. That is not to say that process work, and especially Open Space Technology do not have tangible outcomes and benefits. In fact, in my experience, Open Space does a better job than the standard VISION – MISSION – GOALS type of planning exercises, but that’s another thread.
What started to pick at my thinking was this implicit assumption that if something does not immediately change things in a controlled and predictable way, then it has no value. And so I crafted a long response to this problem this morning, which I reproduce here.
There is no sure fire answer to the problems of organizations and community. The point is that anytime we are dealing with a situation where there are more than two people involved (sometimes even one!) there is tremendous complexity brought to the space. To think that we can be in charge of this complexity and by intervening we can make the exact difference we want seems to me to be somewhat folly.
But there is a reason we think we can get there. It lies in our myths and stories about what organizations are and what creation is, and what the process of collaboration really means. In this sense I think there is a real cultural foundation for what we are talking about and the tension I sense between the remarkable intangible results of OST (bigger than one thinks) and the desired “hard” outcomes of the clients (which are less significant than one might think) are captured up in the dissonance between these stories.
So allow me to share an extended quote from Thomas King, one of my favourite Aboriginal writers, and a man who knows a lot about the shift from one kind of story to another.
In a recent series of lectures, broadcast on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation called “The Truth About Stories: A Native Narrative” Thomas King compares and contrasts the archetypal North American Aboriginal creation story with the archetypal Islamo-Judeo-Christian one. His quote is really revealing, but before I write it out, you have to sit through a couple of stories. The Aboriginal story, a set of images which forms a fairly common narrative about the story of the creation of what in Ojibway is called Mishee-Mackinakong or Turtle Island, goes like this:
Kitche Manitou (Great Spirit or Great Mystery – it’s the same word in Ojibway) created the universe and the elements and the world. After that everything ran on its own. In fact although there are lots of spirit beings in Ojibway stories, Kitche Manitou never puts in another appearance after the beginning. Kitche Manitou creates all this and a spirit woman called Nokomis who lives in the sky. Nokomis becomes lonely so Kitche Manitou creates a consort for her and Nokomis becomes pregnant but the consort leaves her. More despondent than ever she lives in the sky alone. At this point Kitche Manitou exits the scene too, but KM doesn’t really leave, just sits back and watches. Holds space.
Down on earth meanwhile a strange state had enveloped the planet. Everything was flooded. It’s important to note that the flood didn’t happen because Kitche Manitou was punishing anyone…it’s just what happened. The world lay cold and wet, covered in water with no land. There were lots of animals living in the water and, seeing how sad Nokomis was alone in the sky, they invited her to come down to earth to give birth to her children. The turtle volunteers to offer up his back for her to land on. She does and once she touches down, everyone gets really quiet and then someone asks “now what?” Nokomis suggests that the situation they are in calls for some action, or at the very least some land, as she is not very good at swimming and she’s getting cold and hungry. The animals puzzle about this, as there is no land anywhere, and they don’t remember stories about the land. Finally Nokomis suggests that one of them dive down to the bottom of the sea and get some mud from there. Eager to serve her and be good hosts, each of the animals volunteers and one by one, the loon, the ducks, the beaver, the marten and many others all try to swim to the bottom of the ocean, and all come back empty handed.
Finally the muskrat, the smallest and the most humble of all, volunteers. Everyone scoffs at him, but they don’t have any other ideas so away he goes. He stays away for a long time and doesn’t come up and eventually the rest of the animals give him up for dead. They start to really worry now, because there seem to be no options left.
Suddenly the muskrat appears more dead than alive with his eyes closed and out of breath. They pull him on to the back of the turtle and lo and behold he has a tiny amount of mud clenched in his paw. Nokomis takes the mud and spreads it very thinly around the edge of the turtle shell and is begins to expand and grow and cover the shell. Soon the turtle is covered in earth and things begin to grow and the world is created again. It becomes a beautiful place and eventually Nokomis gives birth to her twins, balanced with spirit and body in equal parts. These children were the original Anishnabeg, the “spontaneous beings” from whom we are all descended, so the story goes.
So that’s one story.
The other one you are probably more familiar with, the one where God creates the universe and then the world and then plants and animals and Adam and Eve and after Adam and Eve taste a pomegranate from the tree of knowledge they are forever banished from the Garden in which God had nurtured them. They are forced into a barren world, punished, banished and stripped of their innocence. The world outside the garden is lonely and unforgiving and they are forced to make something of what little they have. The first generation of their children are wracked with violence when one brother kills another. God keeps coming back to intervene either by saving the crowd or punishing them.
You are perhaps more familiar with the second than the first, and of course there are many, many complexities to both stories, but we are dealing with archetypes here. So on to Tom King’s quote.
After he recounts these stories in this lecture called “You’ll Never Believe What Happened” he concludes by pointing out that these stories create two worlds, both of which we dwell in:
So here are our choices: a world in which creation is a solitary, individual act, or a world in which creation is a shared activity; a world that begins in harmony and moves toward chaos, or a world that begins in chaos and moves towards harmony; a world marked by competition or a world marked by co-operation.”
These are pretty stark conclusions but you get the point. These stories can inform everything, and especially the expectations of people in situations where things go wrong. We can choose in those situations to look for the answer from above, from some omnipotent deity that will set things right again, or we can accept the invitation of the animals: we don’t have much, but we have a solid foundation, and with a little help from everyone, we can create a safe place to live.
I think we are in a time when our stories about who we are and where we have come from are changing and paradigms are coming to rub against each other in deep ways. OST is a process predicated on the fact that all of us can have a hand in creating the new world. It is nearly the very extreme example of that, in the world of organizational development. Other methods rely on facilitators or experts (sometimes called “management gurus” which isn’t far from being gods) to come in and fix things, banish the bad and tinker with the good. It’s easy to see results when evil is banished. That is a tangible step towards the “better world” demanded by cynics. It’s much harder to see tangible results from a process where the first step towards making a safe place for your babies is to smear the back of a turtle with mud.
We operate out of deeply held stories about creation and renewal. Where we come into conflict with one another it feels dissonant but sometimes we can’t put our finger on why. I’m suggesting that some of the dissonance we “process” people feel from “results” people is at a fundamental level. I mean, which story do you really resonate with?
You know my answer.