On the weekend I was happy to be running an Open Space event for 125 people who live across British Columbia’s Gulf Islands. We had a ball, and I’ll write more shortly.
One of the great things that happened there was that four amazing people joined me in holding space: Wendy Farmer-O’Neil, Valerie Embry, Nancy McPhee and Beverley Neff.
A million small and interesting conversations happened between us during the event, a great side effect of working with a team. One of them was about the vagaries of praise and blame, and especially how important it is to be stable as a facilitator.
Ever the trickster, Wendy illuminated the topic with this parable:
There was once a zen monk whose master instructed him to go out into the world with nothing but his robe and begging bowl until he had dissolved his ego to the point where he was no longer blown and buffeted by the winds of praise and blame. The student set out in earnest, walking on foot, begging for his meals and lodgings. He wandered for 300 miles and eventually came to rest in a small village where they had no monk or temple. He built himself a small hut where he meditated and ministered to the villagers for 10 years. After ten years, he finally felt he had dissolved his ego completely and was free from being blown and buffeted by the winds of praise and blame. He wrote a poem about it and sent it to his master to celebrate his success.
Upon receiving the note, the master smiled and wrote “fart fart” on the bottom, gave it back to the village messenger to be returned.
When the monk received the note he was furious. How could his master so belittle the accomplishments of the past ten years. He set out on foot and travelled to see his old master himself. When he arrived and was granted audience, he demanded to know what his master had meant. His master replied, “In your poem, you tell me that you are free from being blown and buffeted by the winds of praise and blame, but two little farts blew you 300 miles.”
Want more wisdom like this? Come to our training in November!
🙂
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“My college buddy Al was telling the story last night of a community meeting he had in one of his development district neighborhoods. They were presenting a whole project of new middle and upper income housing right in a neighborhood of poverty and low income folks that would significantly increase the neighborhood’s density and population.
The presentation complete, Q&A opened with total silence, until someone from the back raised their hand and tendered a question: What will they think of us?”
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“My college buddy Al was telling the story last night of a community meeting he had in one of his development district neighborhoods. They were presenting a whole project of new middle and upper income housing right in a neighborhood of poverty and low income folks that would significantly increase the neighborhood’s density and population.
The presentation complete, Q&A opened with total silence, until someone from the back raised their hand and tendered a question: What will they think of us?”
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Seems like a lot of people are getting hit with comment spam, no matter what platform they are using. Blogger, MT…everything seems to fall prey.
Can I just say – knocking on wood – that I have been with Haloscan since near the very beginning, and it is a rare day when I get a piece of comment spam.
Whatever they are doing, it works, and you don’t have to register, enter little codes or log in. And it’s free and it comes with syndication.
So here’s props to Haloscan!
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One of the things I hear from many clients is a call for “structure” in conversations. This is a term in need of a definition, and whenever I hear it, I try to clarify what is meant. In a lot of cases, structure means having items laid out on an agenda and a clear sense that we will come to come agreement on them. “Structure” is often a synonym for “control.” I don’t have an issue with structure, but, in keeping with the previous post, control is more problematic.
Structure appears everywhere. Despite the fact that many people see Open Space meetings as “unstructured” I often talk about as highly structured gatherings. What is unfamiliar is that structure is largely self-organizing, and very complex. But make no mistake, there is a high degree of structure in Open Space. The fact that no one is in sole control of the structure gives some people the willies (including facilitators, by the way!).
Structure in Open Space is elegant because it arises as it is needed and it disappears when it is no longer required. It is emergent. It is forever in flow and changing, leaving behind it a legacy of action, learning, conversation and whatever other outcomes the group itself has generated. As a facilitator, my job is simply to hold the biggest possible container for the best possible structure to emerge. This means not intruding as unworkable structures decay and it means not imposing a pre-conceived method of dialogue on a group. It means working with leadership in shaping the space of infinite possibility with invitation but beyond that it means trusting that the people who have gathered will look after their needs. In essence this practice – holding space – is not different from what any good facilitator will do. In Open Space though, we consciously invite and allow a myriad of possibilities for conversations to organize themselves.
Reading deeply from William Isaacs book, “Dialogue”, I came across his definition of structure yesterday in a fantastic chapter on overcoming structural traps:
I define structure in human conversation and interactions as “the set of frameworks, habits and conditions that compel people to act the way they do.” These structures govern the way we think and act. They are relatively stable: we can predict a way an individual or group will tend to behave once we know the structures that guide them. These structures are composed of the quality, content and timeliness of the information being conveyed. This includes goals, incentives, costs, and feeding that back to motivate or constrain behaviour.
What is interesting about these external structures is the way they couple with individual and internal motivations. I think Open Space is most powerful when it marries individual passion and responsibility with the information structures that Isaacs is talking about. This provides the external sense of urgency and REAL work that is required to create the conditions for radical and transformative self-organization in groups.