SV: OST and decolonization

Mon Feb 17 00:45:17 PST 2003

Chris wrote:
"So I'm increasingly thinking that there is no such thing as empowerment.  I
just don't see it being possible to empower others."

Thank you for your thoughts Chris, it is the same with motivation - another
people cannot motivate me, it comes from within. What we/others can do is to
create opportunities, and environments so that I am able to motivate myself!
And can we have something better than Open Space to create these
opportunities, to remind us (and probably most the management) that we
already know everything there is to know - it is more of finding the
knowledge within again.
All the best
Eva

Basta halsningar

Eva P Svensson
............................................................................
............

EPS Human Invest AB
"Verksamhetsutveckling genom manniskor"
Anasbergsvagen 22
S-439 34  ONSALA
Tel & Fax 0300-615 05
Mobil 0706 - 89 85 50
eva at epshumaninivest.se

-----Ursprungligt meddelande-----
Fran: OSLIST [mailto:OSLIST at LISTSERV.BOISESTATE.EDU]For Chris Corrigan
Skickat: den 15 februari 2003 17:05
Till: OSLIST at LISTSERV.BOISESTATE.EDU
Amne: Re: OST and decolonization

Harrison:

I use that line about disempowerment all the time.  The empowerment thing is
a funny one, but over the years, working with Open Space I have learned that
it is really only possible to disempower somebody, not to empower them.
People empower themselves, people only disempower others.

The kind of power we're talking about of course is the power of spirit, and
that which enables us to move and make movement.  Most of us spend our lives
having this power whittled away by different people and institutions, be
they political, educational, social, economic or what have you.
Occasionally people find their power again.  Sometimes they fully reclaim
it.  How else does one explain Mahatma Gandhi, Rigoberta Menchu, Nelson
Mandela, Aun Sung Suu Kyi and many other men and women who, at some point
during their lives have seemed to have more power than all of their
contemporaries and most of their oppressors?  Nobody empowered these people.
No one said "now you have the ability to do your work."  I think all of
these people chose their work and embarked upon it, and in so doing became
engaged with spirit.  Spirit is what got them going and kept them moving.

So I'm increasingly thinking that there is no such thing as empowerment.  I
just don't see it being possible to empower others.  This is an old learning
from Open Space, indeed it stick out of the old green user's guide as a pull
quote somewhere.  To say "I empower others" is to shut down space totally.

I was recently discussing the two questions that lie at the heart of OST
facilitation practice ("What do you really want to do?  Fine, why don't you
take care of it?") with a participant in Open Space.  She was saying that at
first blush, those questions could feel very disempowering.  I replied that
this probably had more to do with the scale of the initial expectations.
For example, she really wanted to make something akin to world peace.  When
I asked "why don't you take care of it?" she gave a litany of reasons,
including just how much time it would take.  So I asked her the questions
again.  The next answer was "make more time - do that by re prioritizing her
work."  If world peace was truly what she wanted to make, all she needed to
do was make it the most important thing in her life.  Gandhi had the same 24
hours in a day as the rest of us.

The point is that one's power begins to be reclaimed as the scale of the
work becomes more and more human.  Who knows how one makes world peace,
really?  One thing we know for sure is that it takes commitment and time,
and those are things that people CAN do.  And then when the law of two feet
kicks in and people start doing things like learning and contributing,
suddenly "empowerment" breaks out all over the place.

Coming out of Open Space meetings with clients I often talk about the
changes in an organization being undertaken by those who can do them.  In
one story of mine, with a government department that was becoming an agency,
a major issue was the employment status of the employees.  Would they lose
their sonority, benefits and pensions?  It was a big question, important to
everyone and the answer was unknown.  A receptionist in the department
indicated that everything else about the change was peanuts compared to this
for her, but it was frustrating in that she couldn't do anything about it.

To the credit of the senior management, they committed to meeting on a
conference call and discussing this issue the week after our OST meeting
with the intention of ensuring the job security that was important to their
employees.  Collectively they could influence the right people and agencies
in the right way.  It was simply a question of what to do, rather than "How
in the world.?"

And the receptionist, upon hearing the senior management personally commit
to the conference call, declared proudly that she would gladly set up the
call.  She certainly could have chosen to express her wishes through her
union or another confrontational venue, but it was enough for her to speak
from her heart and then do what she could to facilitate the outcome she
wanted.  And in then end, the job security issue was resolved
satisfactorily.

What I love about this whole way of thinking about empowerment is that it is
the dynamic of invitation that is at work in the empowering moment.  It is
the invitation that Spirit drops in front of us which says "pssssst..walk
this way." that begins our journey to finding the freedom to do our own
work.

Harrison, you ask what we may do with all of this, and all I can do is agree
with you - do it more.  As a consultant, people invite me into their
communities and organizations to help them do work, and they are sometimes
more than a little surprised when I show up only with the intent to open
space.  I can't "help" anyone really, but I can maybe draw attention to the
constant invitation from Spirit that swirls around us, and use my role as a
facilitator to simply let people find that for themselves.  In fact since I
have acquired my Tibetan bells, I have had several people say to me that
they think that the bells do this all on their own.  When they ring to begin
the meeting, suddenly there is a different awareness in the room.  Something
is about to be different.  This is not like any other meeting.

And in fact it is like every other meeting in that the same people are
there, the same issues lie in the heart of each person, and folks may even
be sitting in the same circle that they always sit in.  What is different is
simply the fact there is no agenda, and there is this guy we've never met
who is pointing out four universal principles and one universal law that we
forgotten about.  And somehow out of all that, people find their power and
start lighting up like fire flies.

I believe that we can do no more or less than Open Space.  If there is a
better way to do this, then I'm certainly open to it, but I think this may
be one case where we may already be there.

Chris

---
CHRIS CORRIGAN
Consultation - Facilitation
Open Space Technology

Bowen Island, BC, Canada
http://www.chriscorrigan.com <http://www.chriscorrigan.com>
chris at chriscorrigan.com
-----Original Message-----
From: OSLIST [mailto:OSLIST at LISTSERV.BOISESTATE.EDU] On Behalf Of Harrison
Owen
Sent: Saturday, February 15, 2003 4:02 AM
To: OSLIST at LISTSERV.BOISESTATE.EDU
Subject: Re: OST and decolonization

At 04:58 PM 2/14/2003 -0800, CHRIS CORRIGAN wrote:

He said that at the end of the day he realized that this kind of
expectation is what cultural assimilation is all about; that we expect
others to set the agenda and tell us what our work is supposed to be.
He concluded that Open Space works well because it invites us to do our
own work.  In that fundamental and simple act, OST begins to unlock a
lot of years of conditioned thinking, and reveals the possibility of
truly decolonized communities: communities where we do our own work.

Marvelous, Chris! The experience recounted matches that of groups with which
I have worked, and many more facilitated by the likes of Elwin Guild, Mikk
Sarv, and John Engle. In a word, the experience is not unique, but the
statement is -- at least in terms of its simplicity and directness. I am not
quite sure what we do with all this except  -- more of the same.  But I do
think it is very worth while to closely consider what is going on here and
how we might better assist the progress. This is a tricky one, for our role
clearly must be both supportive AND invisible. I find it to be true that
every time I do something for somebody, to some extent I dis-empower them.

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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