Already-thereness, Empowerment and Such (this is a really long reply...omigod it's a thesis)
Chris Corrigan
chris at chriscorrigan.com
Mon Feb 17 10:26:28 PST 2003
I'm going to take a stab at playing with a bunch of the ideas raised
over the last few days. I'll respond to Harrison's post below in
chunks. My comments are in blue:
-----Original Message-----
From: OSLIST [mailto:OSLIST at LISTSERV.BOISESTATE.EDU] On Behalf Of
Harrison Owen
Sent: Monday, February 17, 2003 7:41 AM
To: OSLIST at LISTSERV.BOISESTATE.EDU
Subject: Already-thereness, Empowerment and Such
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'm going to enter some experimental territory here, so hold on for the
ride.
In reply to this notion of anarchism, I'm with you John. I think it is
one way of describing in political terms that which Harrison and Stuart
Kauffman describe in biological terms as "self=organization" and what I
describe in social terms as "unschooling" and in historical terms as
"decolonization." What is fundamental to all of these movements is
this: we are invited to participate, and in choosing to doing so we
become that which we are creating.
It seems to me that "invitation" is absolutely critical to this venture
because nothing external can truly impel us to meaningfully engage in
these types of activities. The motivation is purely from within. And
as we find our purpose, what Eva called "motivation" and what Alfie Kohn
has called "intrinsic motivation" we begin to see that there is a big
invitation waiting for us. The invitation to act with Spirit. It is,
literally and figuratively, simply a matter of "taking a step" towards
that place that suddenly places us in a situation where we are
"self-organizing," "unschooling," "decolonizing," and so on. In fact,
Bernd brought to mind a thought which also seems to me to be fundamental
to this conversation when he raised Taoist "logic." In the I Ching, I
understand that situations are described not as static markers on a road
somewhere, but as dynamic processes. Therefore, what is often
translated as "danger" is actually rendered in the Chinese as "being in
danger." We have not approached some territory bounded in such a way
that allows us the see where danger starts and where it ends, rather we
have arrived in the moment of "being in danger" because of the choices
we have made to put ourselves there.
This is not to "blame the victim" but rather to subtly point to the
concept of karma, understanding that the power to remove ourselves from
these situations lies within each of us. The invitation to be in
another situation surrounds us all the time, and sometimes it is
absolutely present and manifests in concrete ways (what Christians might
term "a calling") and other times it is subtle and deep and therefore
must be uncovered with discerning processes like meditation, yoga or
Open Space Technology, which does for the social body what meditation
and yoga do for the physical body and the mind.
So, anarchism, unschooling, decolonizing, and empowering are all
processes. Quantum physicists describe these kinds of things as wave
functions, as opposed to particles. The wave function is that form of
reality that admits any possibility. The particle is that choice that
is made, what is called the eigenstate. Eigenstates emerge as wave
functions "collapse" which is the physics equivalent of closing space.
All the possibilities become one specific reality. In Open Space, I
think we try to invite organizations or communities to maintain the
quantum wave state as much as possible, only collapsing that wave state
from possibilities to activities through processes like convergence and
action planning. This is why "closing the space" is so important to
avoid on day one and two (of a 2.5 day event), and why we are tasked
with "holding space" as facilitators. To collapse the wave function too
soon is to admit that all the possibilities have been tasted and THIS
ONE is the right one. When one person does that for the whole group, it
is called tyranny. Anarchism, as I understand John to be using the
term, is the opposite of this.
Or as the actor Ozzie Davis said on the Canadian Broadcasting
Corporation yesterday as he spoke from the big peace rally in New York
(hi Ted!):
"When the people are in motion, the government is in session."
Flipping brilliant.
There's more.
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.
I recall that we had this conversation last year when this list
discussed at length Dee Hock's "chaordic organization." This seems to
me to be a concept all about self-organization and distributed
leadership that nevertheless is supposed to have it's genesis in a
specific set of interventions. Almost but not quite, eh?
Self-organization is always "here" Right here, right in this moment. It
is not a place we are going to or coming from. It is right here, right
now. The Millennium Organization (what a name!) is not something we
"do" it is what we "are."
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?
I like them. That's what I'm noticing too.
This idea of grief work as a fundamental tool is interesting too. I see
what you are saying Harrison, but something feels to me like that's only
part of the answer.
When I work with the grief cycle, the thing that people respond to is
the map. They can find themselves on the map and it validates what they
are feeling. And of course because it is a map, it also points out some
places they might go, and this is powerful for people, especially people
who are in the midst of the anger or denial stage or that deeply
unresourceful and collapsed point where all they want to do is sob.
Knowing that it gets better can help honour that moment and open space
for the pain of the "now" to be fully experienced. When someone leaves
that stage it is with the knowledge that they had been fully present
"there" and so there is no residual pain to carry forward as suffering.
But I get the same reaction from people when I use Michael Herman's four
quadrants (based on Wilber's, Arrien's and others) to help discern where
an organization or community might be found in terms of the things that
are preoccupying it at the moment. In fact, this reaction is so
universal and powerful, that I use the four quadrants all the time now
to both think through where people are at, and imagine where they might
go.
In terms of navigation, I think humans need two things. There is a
basic need for maps to help us navigate, maps that show the human story
as it has been played out over and over in our history. Maps like the
Bible, or the I Ching, or the four quadrants, or the grief cycle. These
maps give us comfort as things change, that there is really nothing new
under the sun and that as stuck as we feel at the moment, there is
always hope. Every climb has a descent, every mud pool we cross is held
within banks of solid earth, every dark forest is bounded by open
prairie, every stormy ocean has a shore.
The second thing we need is a way of figuring out where we are. Maps of
the land are no good if you don't know where you are on the map. So
people carry astrolabes, or compasses or GPS systems and through
"orientation" they figure out where they are. Only after you figure out
where you are, does the map become useful. So orientation is a process,
sometimes a quick thing and sometimes it can last a lifetime.
In other realms, orientation takes the form of such things as
meditation. Meditation can acquaint our selves with reality and makes
surfing through volumes of Buddhist sutras meaningful and helpful. In
grief work storytelling is the orienting process, and through the
stories we tell, we get a sense of where we are in the grief process,
where we are on the map.
For organizations, Open Space is the best orienting practice I have ever
seen. It combines a rich collection of other orienting practices like
storytelling, silence, way-finding and inquiry to bring together a
collective consciousness about where the organization is at. After a
big juicy Open Space, suddenly the ground seems a little firmer,
navigation seems to get easier and the maps make sense. Or sometimes
you discover that the map you have been using (maybe it's a "strategic
plan") has been the wrong one all along. It's all good, as Father Brian
would say.
But let's not mistake the process of orientation for the journey itself.
Orienting processes are just one step along the journey. In fact, they
are a necessary step, just to make sure the journey makes sense. I am
not talking about a journey with a fixed destination or arrival point,
but that purest of all journeys, the journey of Spirit, whereby we
simply travel, and like sharks in the sea, by moving, we continue to
breathe and stay alive.
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.
I think I've tried to expand upon the myriad of practical reasons why
Open Space works. I've never really been comfortable with just saying
"it always works" (smile or not) but then I've never really wanted to
tell people the whole story, in case their learning was different.
And yet, how to account for the fact that Elders sit in Open Space
events and after a day proclaim the experience to be profoundly
decolonizing? I know there is something very deep that happens to some
people in Open Space, something beyond self-organization and grief work.
I think it has to do with the acceptance of the invitation to enter the
world of Spirit. Taking a step into that light is immediately
transformative for individuals, communities and organizations. That we
have stumbled upon a process for accelerating that in people who are
ready, is nothing short of a precious miracle.
Chris
Harrison
Harrison Owen
7808 River Falls Drive
Potomac, MD 20854 USA
phone 301-365-2093
Open Space Training www.openspaceworld.com
<http://www.openspaceworld.com/>
Open Space Institute www.openspaceworld.org
<http://www.openspaceworld.org/>
Personal website http://mywebpages.comcast.net/hhowen/index.htm
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