Menu

Refining the four Open Space Practices

November 3, 2005 By Open Space

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.

Geez, this Internet thing really works

November 1, 2005 By Uncategorized

So on Saturday, i stumble across a nice piece of music about Vanuatu and I write a little post about it and mention my old friend John Salong, with whom I lived in 1988.

Not five minutes ago I just got off a Skype call with him. That’s less than four days from the Parking Lot to Google To John and back over Skype.

Turns out that someone who was working with him Googled him, found my posting and John called to say hi and to catch up. We’re both fathers of 8-9 year kids, we’re both working in the same field – facilitation and community development – and we were both equally gobsmacked at the amazing ability of Skype and the web to bring us back together.

It’s times like this when I feel like Skype will save the world.

Center for Reducing Rural Violence

November 1, 2005 By Uncategorized

By way of Harrison Owen, I was referred to Steve Hirsch of the Center for Reducing Rural Violence in Minnesota.

This is one reason why I love America…stuff like this exists down there.

I’m looking forward to a conversation with him on violence in First Nations communities.

Learning to stay

October 30, 2005 By Uncategorized

Thinking about the practice of holding, the most well known of the Practices of Open Space. Many writers have written about what it means to hold space in group work, but few have elucidated some of the traps inherent in this practice as Pema Chodron. In this excerpt from her recent teachings on shenpa she gets at some of the hooks that traps us in space closing:

“Here is an everyday example of shenpa. Somebody says a mean word to you and then something in you tightens� that’s the shenpa. Then it starts to spiral into low self-esteem, or blaming them, or anger at them, denigrating yourself. And maybe if you have strong addictions, you just go right for your addiction to cover over the bad feeling that arose when that person said that mean word to you. This is a mean word that gets you, hooks you. Another mean word may not affect you but we’re talking about where it touches that sore place� that’s a shenpa. Someone criticizes you�they criticize your work, they criticize your appearance, they criticize your child� and, shenpa: almost co-arising.

At Gampo Abbey it’s a small community. We’re thirty monks and nuns there. You have a pretty intimate relationship there, living in community. People were finding that in the dining room, someone would come and sit down next to them and they could feel the shenpa just because this person sat down next to them, because they had some kind of thing going about this person. Then they feel this closing down and they’re hooked.

If you catch it at that level, it’s very workable. And you have the possibility, you have this enormous curiosity about sitting still right there at the table with this urge to do the habitual thing, to strengthen the habituation, you can feel it, and it’s never new. It always has a familiar taste in the mouth. It has a familiar smell. When you begin to get the hang of it, you feel like this has been happening forever.

Generally speaking, however, we don’t catch it at that level of just open space closing down. You’re open-hearted, open-minded, and then… erkk. Right along with the hooked quality, or the tension, or the shutting down, whatever… I experience it, at the most subtle level, as a sort of tensing. Then you can feel yourself sort of withdrawing and actually not wanting to be in that place.

One who paints with earth – Vanuatu

October 29, 2005 By Uncategorized One Comment

I’ve been remiss in my postings of mp3s lately, so here is one for you all.

From Indigenous Resistance records, comes a track about resistance in the South Pacific archipelago of Vanuatu performed and composed by Micheal Franti and Carl Young (Spearhead). I lived for a year with a Ni-Vanuatu, John Damasing Salong, who was from Ambrym. John was at Trent University in the late 1980s with us and we had a great time together. I picked up some Bislama, the Vanuatu pidgin language and we spent many days and night singing, talking and cooking together. AT one point, encouraged by the success of the Jamaican bobsled team at the 1988 Olympics, John had the idea of going out for the 1992 Winter Olympics as the Vanuatu cross-country ski team. It never happened, but that was the kind of guy he was back then.

John came along with me to some pow wows and Ojibway ceremonies and he was always looking for connections with indigenous folks here. Once we sat around a drum with my friend James Whetung and talked about how to build a smoke house. John immediately started thinking about how he could bring traditional Ojibway smokehouse technology back to Ambrym to preserve food without relying on electricity.

Not surprisingly, John returned to Vanuatu to work in development and cultural and environmental preservation. So this track goes out to him, and hopefully the next time he Googles himself, he’ll drop by and leave a note here.