Opening Space with a "grandee"...

Winston Kinch kinch at rogers.com
Wed Oct 16 16:58:48 PDT 2002


Hello all.

Some learnings and questions to share from a small group (25) two day event
last weekend. The group was international (mostly from European countries
plus a few from the US and Canada) in nature with their connection being
their practice of "Focusing" with children. The main reason for the
conference (four days with the middle two in Open Space) can be seen from
the theme: "I&O for Focusing with Children: Sharing our Wisdom and
Furthering our Practice".

One challenge for me was the presence of a group "guru" with a large
controlling streak who claimed "seigniorial rights" on several occasions,
kind of like "space invader lite". For example during the opening after the
principles and law had been reviewed, she interrupted to declare to the
circle: "during MY breakouts, nobody will be allowed in after we start, and
if anyone wants to leave they will be asked to explain why, and also to say
goodbye". The interesting thing is that she had obviously already earned
the respect and honour of the participants, many of whom came to the
conference to learn from her. So on the one hand she was sometimes
disruptive of the process, since some (not all) folks were hesitant to go
against her "amendment" to the Law and so fussed or complained about her
controlling behaviour instead, while on the other she was important to the
process as one of  the key dispensers of (putative) wisdom... an
interesting polarity I had not personally observed (in Open Space) before.

A question that arose from the nature of the group is perhaps more
interesting. In a number of the breakouts (not necessarily the guru's),
there were real-time and intimate experiential exercises, as is in the
nature of Focusing. In those situations, it sincerely felt to some
participants as if there should be no "bumblebeeing" allowed since it could
not only disrupt the process "en cours", but potentially cause damage to a
vulnerable psyche in what I will choose to call a therapeutic situation.
Any other
experience with similar scenarios? My choice, as with the "grandee"
interventions, was to remind folks of the law and principles and let them
make their own decisions as to how they should deal with the issue; but I
wonder...

To avoid potential (multilingual) computer complexities and maximize the
potential for personal expression, we used flip charts for reporting. I
took pictures of them with a digital camera, edited them to make
reasonable-sized files and uploaded them to Yahoo Briefcase (a free storage
space facility on Yahoo). Then I sent an e-mail to all the participants
with detailed instructions on how to use the facility, giving them my
username and password so they can go and peruse and download or print
reports/pictures as they wish. Other than a fair bit of time to edit
(rotate, crop, etc.), name and upload forty pictures, the process went
quite smoothly.  I will let you know what if any feedback I get as to how
well this works for the participants - in fact now that I think of it, I am
going to ask the sponsor to elicit some from them after a couple of weeks..

Your thoughts and comments welcomed,
Winston

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