outcomes and one-off OSTs and OSLIST

Wed Dec 3 11:12:58 PST 2003

You know Harrison is getting excited when he starts writing in red ink
and calling me "Christ!!"

I've been pondering Judi and Lisa's statements about loving the
event-based OST even though we know it could be better, and I have to
admit that even though I tried to come across as getting tired of them,
I like them a lot too.  I was trying to figure out WHY I like them
though and wondered if it wasn't just me.a fatal trap for a facilitator,
to meet his own needs through a pet process, and so this had me a little
worried.

But Harrison put some words around it - gave me the story in fact - and
so I realize now that the reason I love opening space at all is that it
really does invite an organization or a community to embody a new story
about itself - or to rediscover very old ones.

This is really important in a lot of the places I work.  In indigenous
communities and other places where colonialism has done its work, the
story of how and what we should be is so deeply informed by the colonial
culture that it is very rare that an Aboriginal organization or
community actually gets to embody and manifest an identity that is NOT
constrained by the colonial story.  In our communities of course this is
most visibly seen by the way local First Nations governments organize
community meetings by setting the room up as if it is a school room,
with the experts at the front and the masses in rows of chairs.  Even if
the government is trying to embody an inclusive style by holding
consultative meetings with the community, I often wonder if the form of
the meeting, the process itself is doing more harm than good.  And when
the subject of the meeting has something to do with the recovery of our
cultural resources, or land rights or something else that is so closely
aligned to indigenous identity, then it school-room type public meetings
become almost too painfully ironic for me.

As groups working in Open Space, we get to try out a new story, and this
is largely the process benefit of the one-off or event-based OST
meeting.  I realize now that I usually close these meetings by inviting
people to notice how the quality of the room has changed, how
relationships have changed, how the same people we looked at in the
opening circle suddenly seem different after only a few hours together.
The people haven't changed of course, but our stories about them and
about how we can relate to them, have changed.  It's nice to leave
people with a question in their minds about how that change took place
and how easy it might be to recreate it..

In that sense OST is a powerful tool for decolonization and healing in
our communities.that has largely been my experience.  Some people fall
into OST like it's a feather bed.they just seem to enfold themselves in
the dynamics. Others find it hard going, and some hate the process.  And
still others, and I count many of the "results-based" cynics among them,
change and transform and open their eyes to new possibility.

Here on the west coast of North America, many indigenous communities
have stories of transformation.  You may have seen elaborate
transformation masks that feature one animal splitting in two and
another coming forward.  Those new creatures come forward fully formed
from within the original being.  The dances and stories that accompany
these masks talk about a time in the world when animals and spirits and
humans could change easily from one form to another.  It is a reminder
of both the interrelated nature of all beings and the ancestral time,
when these happened regularly.

For me too though it is also a reminder that the story of transformation
lives very powerfully in these communities and cultures.  Whenever we
talk about transformation here on the coast, I invite these stories and
see what they can offer us about transformation of our organizations and
ways of doing things and perspectives about work, results and process.
Recovery of these tools and stories is critical to recovering authentic
expressions of community and organizations that nestle naturally within
the indigenous context.  Because after all, at a very deep level,
indigenous cultures and world views are still here and still alive
although they may be glazed over by the patina of a century or more of
contact, sharing and transcendence.

Open Space invites us to go deep and rediscover the foundations that
inform all of our process work and which, in the end, does get results.
We can foreground parts of the contemporary story that help us do work
and make things "get results", and we can also choose to foreground the
stories that show us how we live in relation to one another and how all
of our lives are dependant on those connections.

Chris

---
CHRIS CORRIGAN
Bowen Island, BC, Canada
http://www.chriscorrigan.com
chris at chriscorrigan.com
(604) 947-9236

-----Original Message-----
From: OSLIST [mailto:OSLIST at LISTSERV.BOISESTATE.EDU] On Behalf Of
Harrison Owen
Sent: Wednesday, December 03, 2003 5:33 AM
To: OSLIST at LISTSERV.BOISESTATE.EDU
Subject: Re: outcomes and one-off OSTs and OSLIST

 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

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