outcomes and one-off OSTs and OSLIST

[Harrison Owen]

 Christ Wrote:

I think we are in a time when our stories about who we are and where we
have come from are changing and paradigms are coming to rub against each
other in deep ways.  OST is a process predicated on the fact that all of
us can have a hand in creating the new world.  It is nearly the very
extreme example of that, in the world of organizational development.
Other methods rely on facilitators or experts (sometimes called
"management gurus" which isn't far from being gods) to come in and fix
things, banish the bad and tinker with the good.  It's easy to see
results when evil is banished.  That is a tangible step towards the
"better world" demanded by cynics.  It's much harder to see tangible
results from a process where the first step towards making a safe place
for your babies is to smear the back of a turtle with mud.

At any rate, I hope what I am saying makes sense.  We operate out of
deeply held stories about creation and renewal.  Where we come into
conflict with one another it feels dissonant but we can't put our finger
on why.  I'm suggesting that some of the dissonance we feel from
"results" people is at a fundamental level.  I mean, which story do you
really resonate with?  You know my answer.

Chris - you have certainly moved the discussion in what I would consider
to be wonderful new territory. There is no question in my mind that we
are - to a very large extent - the stories we tell. Not the trivial
little tales that appear in the morning newspapers, but the deep stories
that constitute our mythic consciousness.

There used to be a day when the power of these deep stories was
appreciated, but in recent times they are dismissed with the light
thought that they are "just a story." And of course we all know that
only the "facts" will do. And when it comes to myths, these are not only
dismissed, but dissed. Worse than a story, myth now means lie and
falsehood. How the world changes. And of course, for enlightened people
such as ourselves, we have long since thrown off the bondage of myth.
How sad. And we never really do - throw it off, that is. We simply
develop new ones, and they of course, are understood to be The Truth, or
better yet Scientific Truth. But it is still a story, now dressed up in
different clothes. We call them "Theories" - but at the end of the day,
these Theories are simply likely stories which help us interpret our
world. So our essential nature hasn't changed - we are still story
tellers whose life expectations are shaped by the stories we tell. Myth
by any other name. What is different now is that the formative power of
these tales is somehow out of our awareness. And when the stories are
warped, distorted or partial - the world and our space in that world is
distorted and shrunk. Of course, we could tell a different story. . .

And I think that new story creation is a major part of what happens in
Open Space. But it is not so much telling a story as being a story.

I love where we are headed! Go for it!!!

Harrison



*
*
==========================================================
OSLIST at LISTSERV.BOISESTATE.EDU
------------------------------
To subscribe, unsubscribe, change your options,
view the archives of oslist at listserv.boisestate.edu,
Visit:

http://listserv.boisestate.edu/archives/oslist.html
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.openspacetech.org/pipermail/oslist-openspacetech.org/attachments/20031203/1d0d5bf0/attachment-0016.htm>