OS and AI

[Richard Norris]

Re: [OSLIST] OS and AIAm also enjoying the discussion.  The gems of wisdom that come from experience are greatly appreciated.

Having facilitated many "diversity" workshops I noticed a great many facitltators become frustrated when the outcomes did not meet their expectations. Usually one of the facilitators says something like ...we were not successful, the participants "didn't go there"!  My first thought has always been....go where?  My second thought was that the "facilitators trap has been sprung"...the workshop had become more about the facilitator than for the participants.

Guess the great facilitators I remember most were the ones who knew the delicate art of being "silently present" .....they gave us lots of space so we could teach ourselves and learn at the gut level!   Learned leadership and responsibility from them..... as for the content of their courses...we taught that to each other....while they made the coffee!

Rich Norris
Satellite Beach, Florida


   

  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Chris Weaver 
  To: OSLIST at LISTSERV.BOISESTATE.EDU 
  Sent: Saturday, April 28, 2001 4:08 AM
  Subject: Re: OS and AI


  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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