Already-thereness, Empowerment and Such

[Harrison Owen]

One of the great things about  OSLIST is the way conversations start at
multiple points and then ebb and flow to form a common theme. Not unlike
what happens in Open Space (because it is Open Space, I guess) this
phenomenon appears to be but one more example of what we have been talking
about. Emergent order. And John, I guess that makes us all "anarchists" ...
although I have a little trouble with the word. I concede that the literal
sense is correct, but the associations lead to some directions I would
rather not go. I found myself getting into the same sort of trouble when I
used the word  metastasis  to describe what seems to happen when space is
opened in an organization. It can simply be closed down, but more often
than not it subtly spreads rather like a cancer. Correct idea. Nasty
thought. Oh Well.

I suspect we may be one the edge of some new territory here in this
discussion. The ideas have certainly appeared before, but I detect the
possibility of a rather elegant formulation just hiding out at the edges.
Way back in the Dark Ages (Riding The Tiger, 1991) I found myself thinking
and writing about what I called then, The InterActive Learning Organization
(aka The Open Space Organization). By '94 the same idea appeared in
glorious new nomenclature with the arrival of The Millennium Organization.
Looking back over those efforts, I have to confess that it may have been
the right idea, but definitely looked at in the wrong way. Both the
InterActive Learning Organization and The Millennium Organization (same
thing by a new name) seemed to be something we might "do" -- as in
"creating the Open Space Organization." Lovely idea, but fatally flawed, or
at the very least, a waste of effort. Why create something that already
exists? The problem was, we just didn't know it.

         So where do we go from here? I suggest starting with the basics.
Really basic. It seems to me that certain fundamental forces pretty well
account for our present existence. Gravity, for one, makes it possible to
walk around on good old planet earth and do what we do. Perhaps we may
chafe at the constraints, but truthfully there is not too much that we can
do about it. The forces of self-organization provide a reasonable account
for our progress from the moment of the Big Bang until this present
instant. and please note, we didn't have to do a thing. It happened all by
itself, or as Stuart Kaufmann would say -- Order for free.
         Add in one other "force" -- the power of Griefwork -- as it
enables us to navigate the sometimes rocky terrain thrown up at us as we go
on our self-organizing ways. The problem here is simply that as we, our
organizations, and our world move along the path of self-organization,
things come and go, they end. They die. Seen from some cosmic vantage
point, this ending, this dying is simply a part of the natural process of
things. However, when it becomes our end, or our death, cosmic vantage
points become a little hard to find, and in fact everything becomes very
personal. Fortunately for us, there appears to be hardwired within each one
of us another natural process, which like the process of birth, brings most
of us through the hard places, and that is Griefwork. At least that seems
to be the story for the last 13.7 billion years (according to latest
calculations, but what's a billion here or there?).
         Jumping to conclusions, it appears that if everything is
self-organizing, everything is Open Space Organization! We're already
there. We can stop working so hard trying to create what already exists,
and better spend our time  understanding what we already are. How do you
like those bananas?
         And what do we say about Open Space? For those of us who may have
thought we created this wild, wonderful, novel critter -- it is doubtless
time to eat a large amount of humble pie. We did not create a thing. In
fact Open Space by other names had been doing just fine, thank you, for
billions of years. But Open Space is not without its value, for it provides
us with the opportunity to consciously and intentionally be what we already
are. And who knows, we might just become better at it????

The practical applications? Well for one thing, the next time a client
asks, "Does Open Space always work?" -- we might answer, "Truthfully we
don't really know, but it seems to have done pretty well for the past 13.7
billion years." I am not sure that I would recommend this approach, unless
undertaken with a very large smile.

Harrison

Harrison Owen
7808 River Falls Drive
Potomac, MD 20854 USA
phone 301-365-2093
Open Space Training www.openspaceworld.com
Open Space Institute www.openspaceworld.org
Personal website http://mywebpages.comcast.net/hhowen/index.htm

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