OS and AI

[Chris Weaver]

I am really enjoying this discussion.  Thanks, Peg, for sharing your
soul-searching, particularly the gem about the 4 children at Passover.

Harrison, your comments are a touch-stone for me.  In The Power of Spirit
you talked about being a theory-builder.  I honor you for your
theory-building, and I am considering your theory that in OST people arrive
where they would arrive via AI or other processes, but without the fuss and
without being disempowered by the facilitation.

I'm digging through my own experience to mess-it-around into some
theorizing.  By far my most extensive experience as a space-holder has been
in my ten years as an elementary school teacher.  This experience can be
described as a ten year search for the minimal appropriate structure for
each child and each community of children to fully engage
with...well...themselves, their innate spirit to grow and thrive and learn
and live and love.

Minimal appropriate structure took many forms - an array of methodologies.
With some students, I used a lot of structure.  When I understood them, and
built the structure on this understanding, I discovered over time that I was
holding space for them well.

Being a facilitator for a group of adults is not identical to being a
teacher for a group of children.  I wonder:  How is it different, and how is
it the same?

In another vein, I have had wonderful experiences with adults in structures
that dictate spending some time in pairs.  Some storytelling circles begin
this way, and AI discovery process works this way.  Being in an AI structure
that established that I would spend an hour with another person responding
to a list of open-ended questions, and hearing my partner's responses,
elicited a deep and valuable experience of a particular kind.  An hour in an
Open Space meeting yields a different variety of valuable experience.  As a
participant, I arrive in a different place in each.

Musing about structure, I reflect also on a methodology for improvisational
movement called Interplay.  Each Sunday afternoon I spend two hours in a
"playgroup."  In many ways this is Open Space - the law of two feet is at
work, and at all times, "you are more important than the system."  Interplay
is minimal appropriate structure, and invitation-based.  But it is the help
of the system, the movement forms, that has opened up for me a profoundly
new level of engagement with my own body and with other people in movement.
Interplay introduced me to the idea of "ecstatic following."  Responding to
a diversity of structures provided by a master facilitator has opened doors
I never could have found on my own.

So much for theorizing...I am only messing around in the mess....

Chris
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