AW: The Oral - Visual lives next door

[Visuelle Protokolle]

Bernd, Chris and all:

Bernd, you touched me like so many others with your description of your
work, of your tasks. and Chris, you have to give so many astonishing
insights. you say:

  It seems to me anyway, that writing,
>talking and sensing are all communication strategies, and while
>certain cultural contexts will select some strategies over others,
>all strategies are available to everyone
>
 "there" .... is a message
>that is transmitted orally, although the reminders are all visual
>and kinesthetic: dances, masks, carvings, and so on.  All of these
>things "carry" the story with them.
>
>
 Low context cultures, in my opinion, tend to be less
>comfortable with the limited information that sometimes comes out of
>Open Space small groups, where people have been too engaged in the
>process of conversation to write down much of what was said.  ... reading
the reports in no way helps to
>explain ... why it was such a high ...

When we get touched by descriptions of the life in oral/visual cultures, we
can look at the strange qualities of these cultures like in a prehistoric
museum  and go home afterwards. go on living as usual, going to Open Space
and writing texts as usual, with very limited information - and poor
touching quality.

Or we can realize, that the oral - visual type actually lives next door, or
even lives in us.

For me it was always hard to understand how such a brilliant thing like Open
Space is normally documented in the most traditional and poor way, by
writing texts. and even worse, because like Chris points out, Open Space has
all the potential of engaging people. when it was "such a high", and then
some poor guys have to stay and make their homework and write something,
produce more of the same, texts.

I talked to Harrison Owen about that some years ago in an Open Sapace at the
lake of Starnberg in Bavaria, but seemed not to get his attention.

We accompanied about ten Open Spaces and made visual protocols. mainly
pictures, some words, no long texts. Everybody was happy. Sometimes people
made their written reports as well, sometimes not. But what counted was the
pictures. People loved to find their contributions as pictures. And were
astonished to "get the whole picture" at the end (and even in brochure form
a bit later), to really see what had happened in all the groups. We made the
astonishing experience, that is was sufficient to visit every group just for
about ten minutes to catch the story. we asked people to look critically,
but seldomly were asked to correct or add something. once a consultant said:
only by your pictures I understood what happened. I know that I am good, and
would have brought in my view of the theme and would have gone home proudly.
By your pictures I suddenly realized the quality of the contributions of the
others, and how we enriched each other and together reached to a higher
level!

There we are! even in a low context culture we can reach  experiences of
inner satisfaction, joy, understanding, just by awakening the oral-visual,
sometimes visional guy in us. it is easy, it is fun, it goes deep, it is
sustainable. which method could gain more from this fact than Poen Space!

I believe that the Open Space method simply was not fully developed yet.
maybe that is a sacrilege, but once I found the oral (Open Space) visual
(Visual Facilitaion) combination to work so well, to work inside of us,
mostly all of us, why be satisfied with less?

Reinhard

VISUELLE PROTOKOLLE
Kuchenmueller & Dr. Stifel

Munich Germany

Tel: +49-89-202 447 48

http://www.visuelle-protokolle.de

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