Opening Space for The Question

My buddy Harrison Owen has been writing like crazy a lot lately. He has been almost singlehandedly keeping the conversation going on the OSLIST, where Open Space practitioners gather to play. And the other day he launched a new paper into the mix: Opening Space for The Question.

The paper is about the concept of Nichtwissen, a German word that Harrison translates as “Unknowing”. Open Space for the Question means to cultivate a practice that has us sitting in the Unknowing, working to find where the contemplation of the question takes us. In a really good synopsis of the practice that gets us there, Harrison writes:

There is a phrase, perhaps even a practice, that comes I believe from the Quaker Tradition. It is “sitting the question.” The notion is a simple one, however hard it may be to implement for impatient knowledge seekers. When deep questions arise, Stop! Don’t move a muscle; keep your fingers off the keyboard and away from Google. Don’t talk to a soul and avoid the library. Just wallow in the question, savor it, and consider it from all angles. Go under it, around it, inside. And for goodness sake, don’t even think about an answer, for surely as the sun rises, any answer you think of will be premature. And a premature answer will not only be irrelevant, but it will also prevent you from experiencing the bitter-sweet moments that arise when sitting the question. And who knows, as you sit it may happen that the question evaporates into thin air, in which case you are spared the thankless task of finding an answer to a meaningless question. Then again, the question may become deeper and you will be consumed with the possibilities of not-knowing, and your Possibility Space will have expanded almost without limit. Nichtwissen will have given its gift.

This is what is required for emergence to happen if a large group of people are to generate innovative responses to the question before which they are sitting. It ultimately comes down to a personal practice of opening and a personal practice of grounding with a whole lot of communication and social trial and error in between.

[tags]open-space, facilitation, practice[/tags]