non-convergence

Wed Mar 17 18:48:01 PST 2004

G'day Chris

Really enjoyed the story about the folks in British Columbia, especially the
bit about non convergence. I have to admit to having my fair share of
struggles with this part of an open space event. Convergence was a real
struggle at our office's last OS workshop.  Remember I said half the room
championed freedom shock. Havn't been able to put my finger on it, but its
always felt like stuffing an exploding suitcase.

I followed your Bolg and read Michael Herman's words on this too. I love it!

We are in the process of re visiting our office's Open space event by
having, yes, another whole open space workshop. I will deffinately be
recommending we use Non-convergance as it makes the whole thing pretty
seamless. Those who want to can pick up where we left off, and those
champions of freedom shock can champion that again if they wish.

Are you still coming to New Zealand? Let me know if you are?

Mike Copeland

-----Original Message-----
From: Chris Corrigan [mailto:chris at CHRISCORRIGAN.COM]
Sent: Saturday, 13 March 2004 9:41 p.m.
To: OSLIST at LISTSERV.BOISESTATE.EDU
Subject: Organizations as complex relational processes, narratives and
emergent action (and a story!)

Okay, a dose of theory here.

I came across a paper by Frank Smits from Sydney, Australia, courtesy of the
Plexus Institute called How stories affect human action in organisations,
(http://website.lineone.net/%7efrank.smits/Essays/Stories.htm) last week.
I've had a chance to read it and it posits a number of interesting points.

My reading of the paper follows the development of these key ideas:

   1. Organizations are not "things" but rather relational processes.

   2. Human beings use story to represent and understand the patterns of
experience.

   3. Stories only represent partial versions of reality and so narrative
interpretation is subject to power dynamics.

   4. Powerful storyteller can make people "captives" in the story; this is
the process of mythmaking.

   5. "Organisations, in fact the 'organising via relating, exist in order
to 'do something'. Hence somehow, the individuals in the organisation need
to 'act'...if our identity is clear and we are actively interconnected in
interdependent processes that when information comes available, action can
emerge. The information sharing happens in interactive processes between
individuals (either inside or outside the 'organisation')."

   6. "In the language of Gover (1996) 'our identities are being constitutes
and reconstituted with their physical, cultural and historical contexts'.
The roots of narratives and identity, he claims, 'merge, inextricably
embedded and nurtured in the soil of human action'."

   7. Narratives that resonate with an individual's experience create
meaningful and sustained emergent action.

   8. If people in organisations don't pay attention to the Individual
Intention, the likelihood of the vortices of the narratives in those
organisation resonating with the vortex of the Individual Intention is
purely one of chance. It is due to individuals themselves to actively spend
the time to understand other people's Individual Intention.

   9. By consciously working on understanding Individual Intention and
consciously work on fuzzifying the narrative the complex responsive process
of interaction between the people will move to the attractor at the critical
point. This can only happen in self-organised process of interactions where
meaning can start to flow.

All of this is interesting stuff, especially the deep connection between
narrative and action. Organizations as relational processes, as arenas for
the practice of storytelling and mythmaking (with it's attendant careful
attention to compassion) and all of this as a propellant to emergent action.
It's a lucid thread.

For my money the last point is the most interesting and an example of it
cropped up for me in an Open Space meeting I facilitated last weekend.

I was working as part of a team developing a transportation demand
management plan for a city in British Columbia, basically coming up with a
strategy to get people out of their cars. As part of the process we convened
a 1.5 day Open Space meeting with the intention that the participants would
begin to work on citizen-based initiatives to get the message out.

These people didn't know each other, and so Day One was taken up with a lot
of conversation about the "typical" issues. The day was essentially about
getting to know each other, testing out ideas and theories, exploring the
stories and myths about the issue and basically sussing out the power
relationships, the allies and the opponents. There was very little new
content, but the day was a rich field of developing and dissolving
structure, process and relationships, coalescing around stories. Because we
were in Open Space and the agenda was driven by deep personal passion and
responsibility, the process of group-forming was accelerated. By the end of
the day there was one story that emerged to invite action. Someone mentioned
that in the very neighbourhood in which we were meeting, the world's first
curbside blue box program had been initiated. Whether or not this was an
observable fact, it became the story upon which we hung the potential for
citizen action in Day Two.

Day Two was a two-hour action planning session, and I opened with that story
and my interpretation of the fact that we simply don't know when and how
small initiatives will blossom. And so the invitation for action planning
was to start something small that could change everything.

Within two hours there were three major initiatives sketched out. One
involved closing a street down for a one-day festival promoting biking,
walking and bussing. One was a project to have coporations sponsor evening
busses into town from the suburbs on weekend nights to encourage teenagers
to stay out of their cars. The third idea was the formation of a website and
the coordination of letter writing and lobbying campaigns to align actions
on specific issues. All of these ideas had champions, follow-up meeting
dates and committees or teams of people committed to working.

I found the way this Open Space event evolved to be right in line with a few
of the paragraphs from Smits' paper:

                "By consciously working on understanding Individual
Intention and consciously work on fuzzifying the narrative...the complex
responsive process of interaction between the people will move to the
attractor at the critical point. This can only happen in self-organised
process of interactions where meaning can start to flow. That is the domain
of dialogue; it is the art of 'thinking together'... Or, in the words of
Bohm:

                                    From time to time (the) tribe
(gathered) in a circle. They just talked and talked and talked, apparently
to no purpose. They made no decisions. There was no leader.
(.) The meeting went on until finally it seemed to stop for no reason at all
and the group dispersed. Yet, after that, everybody seemed to know what to
do (.). Then they could get together in smaller groups and do something or
decide things.

                                    -- David Bohm, On Dialogue (quoted in
Jaworski, 1998: 109)

                In this quote Bohm describes how dialogue as a way of people
interacting manages to let meaning emerge because of people understanding
each other's Individual Intentions. Effective action could emerge. Note that
the course of action was not decided by someone outside the process or
decided via a compromise! It was emergent because the process allowed the
Group Intention to move to the Edge of Incoherence."

This is exactly what happened, with people saying in the closing circle that
they were very surprised at how quickly the action plans came together. This
echoes my experience of using an Open Space action planning process we call
"non-convergence," so-called because it eschews voting, preserves the
diversity and complexity of the Day One conversations and keeps the space
open for subtle pattern and meaning-making by those motivated enough to
initiate action.

Smits' paper gives me a nice theoretical frame to understand that process.
I thought it might spark some discussion here as it suggests a move from
seeing organizations as complex adaptive systems to complex relational
processes.  In Wilberian terms, that seems like a very big shift from the
right hand side to the left hand side.

At any rate, I've also posted this to my weblog at
http://www.chriscorrigan.com/parkinglot/2004_03_01_archive.html#10791665
3320999533 for comment.

---
CHRIS CORRIGAN
Bowen Island, BC, Canada
(604) 947-9236

Consultation - Facilitation
Open Space Technology

Weblog: http://www.chriscorrigan.com/parkinglot
Homepage: http://www.chriscorrigan.com
chris at chriscorrigan.com
(604) 947-9236

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