FW: Your paper Open Space and World Cafe (Very Long)

[Harrison Owen]

About a week ago I met (electronically) Ted Lumely. The introduction came
through Amada who lives in the UK. Ted, it turns out, lives on an Island off
Vancouver, BC just 20 miles away from Chris Corrigan. With that kind of
proximity to trouble, I knew I was going to be in more trouble. My
prescience was perfect, but the trouble has definitely been of a good sort.
Ted is all excited about something he calls "Inclusionality." I asked him
what that might be, and his answer follows. It is a long read and a little
convoluted <interesting use of language :-)>, but it is all about Space,
Dynamic Space. I found the whole thing fascinating, and thought you might as
well. Ted is not on OSLIST, but maybe he would join. And for whatever it is
worth, it seems like there is a whole group of folks messing around in the
same pot, most particularly one Alan Rayner, a British Biologist. For more
on all this, check out www.bath.ac.uk/~bssadmr

Harrison

Harrison Owen
7808 River Falls Drive
Potomac, Maryland   20845
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
OSLIST at LISTSERV.BOISESTATE.EDU
To subscribe, unsubscribe, change your options, view the archives Visit:
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-----Original Message-----
From: ted lumley [mailto:emiliano at goodshare.org]
Sent: Sunday, March 21, 2004 5:45 PM
To: Harrison Owen
Subject: RE: Your paper Open Space and World Cafe


harrison,

yes, 'inclusionality' has been my daily bread for some years now.  in 1995,
i incorporated a not-for-profit company 'goodshare' with the idea of
providing an open investment advisory service which allowed investors to
'highgrade' their investments from simply going with the 'sharpshooters'
(in my pool analogy) to those who were sustaining the invisible value
potentials in the community dynamic, as they 'took their tangible profits'.
(it has never been 'launched' however, and that is another story).   it is
an idea 'beyond ethical investment' (a causal assertive behaviour based
scheme) as it was based on the co-creation of possibility.   an analogue
would be a group of drivers on a crowded freeway, the extent to which they
can accommodate their assertings in a resonant manner so as to sustain a
harmonious flow-dynamic.    it is easy to see that the harmonious flow
breaks down when each driver is intent on pursuing his individual private
agenda in a non-accommodating manner.  'accommodation' in this context is
to do with co-shaping the dynamical space that one is enveloped and
included in (so as to sustain possibility-to-move for one another) and
while an individual can't 'do it on his own', he can have an ethic of
accommodation which, taken together the accommodative ethic of others,
co-produces 'resilience' that sustains the harmonious flow-dynamic of the
collective in spite of inevitable 'mistakes' and 'angry outbursts', spikes
of aggression etc.  i.e. the accommodative ethic leads to a resilient,
fault-tolerant harmony-sustaining community dynamic.

the more popular alternative proceeds by seeking to optimize the
performance of the individual (person, company, nation etc.) and this
individual performance optimization leads to a collective dynamic that is
fault-intolerant (brittle, lacks resilience) and to an exclusionary ethic
of elimination of the 'less-performant'.   such as system is not capable of
sustainable harmony (lacks the resilience of accommodative-assertive
resonance) but undergoes periodic breakdown and repairs.   optimizing the
performance of the individual is the dominant ethic in 'the west'.   it is
built into a western education and into the western economic system of
where competition takes precedence over co-creative shaping of possibility
space (co-creation of invisible value).

as in my note passed to you by amanda, one can see that space, the
dynamical configuration the emerges continuously from the way things move
relative to one another and the collective, is the mother of all 'value'
(the 'mysterious woman' of lao tsu).   it is a 'larger and deeper' way of
perceiving the world dynamic than in the western cultural default terms of
'the motion of independent material agents as if in empty space'.   our
default view that seeks understanding in terms of 'what things do' is
certainly a gross over-simplification since, in the reality of our
experience, many coherently self-organizing systems interpermeate within
the common space of our biosphere, and so 'possibility-to-move', without
which we cannot move as we would like, is continuously emerging from the
manner in which we move relative to one another.

this observation is not 'new' but has been discussed in the literature of
the foundations of scientific thought by henri poincaré, in particular, in
the context of 'l'espace restreint' (space which is crowded as in the
finite and unbounded commonspace of the biosphere).

if one uses the viewing window of 'non-euclidian spherical space', rather
than euclidian space, one can see that it is the shape of the holeyness
that is giving possibility-to-move that is the over-riding shaper of the
evolving dynamic of the collective.   that is, the value-giver is what you
can't see (possibility-to-move, which is purely implicit/relational) and
all actuality precipitates from possibility, yet the western viewing lenses
(euclidian space where all value is invested in the movements of the
'independent' constituents) would have us ascribe value to the assertive
action-based performance of individual entities (persons, organizations,
communities, nations) and ignore the motherspace of possibility from which
actuality is being precipitated.

this is where analogies like the game of pool and the group of drivers on
the crowded freeway (l'espace restreint) help expose the ultimate folly of
this 'individual work ethic' since to get work done requires the
'possibility space' to do it (potential energy is necessary for kinetic
energy to outwell).

[Sidenote: as einstein laboured long and hard to have people see, 'space is
not empty', .. space is the stuff that dynamics are made of.  space has an
invisible potential or springy elasticity that sources kinetic outwelling
and archives kinetic inwellings, but, as yvonne aburrow, one of our
inclusionality sharing circle coparticipants says, if you cut the bouncy
ball molecular collective apart to discover the source of the bounce, you
are not going to find out 'where, exactly, it lives' because it is purely
relational in the manner that potential energy (energy of position) is
purely relational.]

anyhow, while many agreed that the basic of concept of goodshare as an
investment highgrading facility (to shift from companies that were not just
shot-makers but where shape-makers and thus potentials-sustainers as well)
seemed sound, access to information on which to base the highgrading was
not currently available.   [imagine examining individuals driving on
crowded roads with the aim of assessing each individual in terms of his
having the ethic of infusing and replenishing possibility-enabling
potentials that could be harvested by-and-by, the accommodative behaviour
that sustains a harmonious flow-dynamic.  since accommodative-assertive
coresonance is non-causal and cannot be attributed to the individual, there
is no means by which we can examine the individual's behaviour to make this
assessment].

i know that some driver's on a crowded road are into the co-creating of
accommodative-assertive coresonance to sustain a harmonious flow-dynamic,
... so that nominally, there has to be some way to identify who has the
ethic and who doesn't, ... but yet the mathematics says that there can be
no assertive behaviour-based causal attribution of responsibility for this
emergent harmonious-flow-sustaining collective behaviour.   another way to
look at this is that the individual geese use the enveloping space as a
mediative medium that launders out the causal attribution; i.e. they beat
their wings to make the enveloping commons of airspace resonant (the local
air molecules stimulated by wave dynamics and their own relational
elasticity self-organize as can be seen in wind-tunnel photography where
the 'V' shapes forming at the nose-tips of each goose are standing waves in
the 'fluid dynamic' of the air, and the geese can 'feel' when the multiple
individual V's coalesce so as to create a sweetspot in the flow dynamic
where resistance is lowered in the manner of the well designed ship whose
asserting into the hydrodynamical vessel enters into coresonance with the
natural accommodating wave dynamics of the hydraulic medium.

that is, the standing wave resonance that 'wants to form' (a
low-resistance, assertive-behaviour facilitating sweetspot wanting to
emerge in the slipstream of the collective dynamic) in the mediative medium
of the enveloping airspace is the guide that orchestrates the
phase-coupling of the wing-beating of the geese and their relative
proximity.  the motorcyclist can feel this same thing in freeway traffic;
i.e. he is the source of one of these V-shaped standing wave perturbations
in the enveloping airspace and so is every other vehicle, and particularly
large semi-trailers.   he can feel (e.g. by the flapping of his clothes and
the amount of throttle he has to use) where the sweetspots in the
flow-dynamic which includes air and vehicles and all, ... are going to
emerge.   but they do not simply 'occur', they are co-creatively shaped and
the sweetspot is 'not there' prior to his moving into it, since he is
'co-creatively fashioning it' by the manner in which he moves relative to
the others and therefore by the manner in which his standing wave 'V'
coalesces with the others.

thus, a collective can co-create a 'potential energy hole' (sweetspot in
slipstream of the collective dynamic) that they can ride along in.   this
is precisely what ships with bulbous underwater  bows do; they create an
assertive-accommodative coresonant relationship with the hyrodynamical
vessel that envelopes and includes them.

in the case of the ship, he can read on his fuel consumption guage, when he
reaches an assertive velocity that 'matches' (is in assertive-accommodative
coresonance with) the opening-up-for-his-asserting reception of the
enveloping-including hydrodynamical system.   where that coresonance is
reached, his fuel consumption will be as much as ten percent less to cover
a given distance.

these ship/geese/freeway driver examples of the over-riding importance of
invisible potentials (possibility space) that manifest when
accommodative-assertive coresonance is sustained show their invisible value
in terms of the speed and range translocation advantages; i.e. the geese
can, as a group flee dangers more quickly and extend their foraging range,
distinct 'evolutionary possibility enhancements'.  such measurements are
purely relative; i.e. relative to the dynamics of fellow, predating
organisms and relative to the dynamics of plant growth (seasonal) and
ambient conditions (snow covering food supplies etc.).    the measurement
situation blurs with human organizations, however, who tend to forget about
or even deny the intrinsic relativity of their sustained existence and see
themselves as independent organisms (organizations) whose future is
determined purely by their assertive behavioural performance (the
reductionist notion of 'natural selection' or 'survival of the fittest'
which reduces perception to the false terms of 'independence' of assertive
behaviour of individual participants), as if the space around them were
empty and non-participating.

so anyhow, i had this problem with the means of identifying organizations
that embodied an ethic appreciative of the invisible value of sustaining
assertive-accommodative coresonance, in that such identification could not
be made, in any way, on the basis of the assertive actions of the
organization.   that is, the notion that an organization is 'good' or
'well-behaved' is nonsense, in this inclusionality sense.

the problem is, that as soon as one 'isolates' the organization and sees it
as an independent thing capable of its own behaviour, one denies its innate
dynamical interdependence (as alluded to in the example of the football
play).   from the principle of relativity, which is available to our direct
natural experience, ... the value of the behaviour of any individual or
organization can only be relative to the enveloping dynamical commonspace
that the individual is immersed and included in.   if the individual was
truly asserting as an independent agent in empty infinite euclidian space,
... what value could possibly be attached to such behaviour?  ... the
notion of value in that case vanishes.

the endower of value is therefore the enveloping dynamical space that the
individual's assertive behaviour is 'relative to'; i.e. space is the source
of value;i.e. the relative dynamic of the collective from which possibility
emerges is the source of value.

stymied in the launching of goodshare by the epistemological difficulties,
i moved from dallas to montreal to shift my inquiry to the inclusional
nesting level of people (in 1998).  i was intuitively attracted by the
'triple junction' of three cultures, anglophone, francophone and indigenous
(native american).  the so-called 'three-body problem' is fundamental to
the epistemological difficulty where causality is laundered out of the
system; i.e. where sustained harmony in the dynamic of a collective cannot,
in any way, be attributed to the assertive 'well-behaving' actions of the
individual. sustained harmony of a three-plus body collective being an
'emergent behaviour', ... emerging from the manner in which the
participants move relative to one another while under each others
simultaneous mutual influence (the condition of 'relativity').   a
situation wherein, as soon as the assessor of goodness or badness of
behaviour focuses on the assertive dynamics fo the individual, he misses
the point.   a verifiable condition which establishes why management based
on the judgement of good behaviour versus bad behaviour doesn't work (i.e.
it rests on the premise of the 'dynamical independence' of the individual
which is a falsehood).

living in downtown montreal, i was learning from the underbelly of the
tripartite dynamical collective, lesbians and gays, the so-called 'mentally
disordered', the addicts of gambling, alcohol and drugs, representing all
three cultures.  i spent alot of time in bars, played a lot of pool, met a
lot of great humanist people, participated in native pow-wows and youth
councils, and generally learned alot about multi-constituent dynamics.   at
this point, i had suspended my focus on 'investment advisory services' and
was eager to co-develop a cellular learning module as a vehicle for sharing
awareness of 'inclusionality' (non-independence of assertive behaviour) and
at that time i connected with present colleagues alan rayner, doug caldwell
et al (the log book of which is being maintained by alan rayner).  the
cellular learning module, i was basing on the 'centerpoint' cellular
learning scheme that came out of a jungian psychology group in st louis,
which has been very successful in raising awareness of subtleties in the
dynamics of our individual and collective minds.  it operates in the 'open
space' manner of a native 'learning circle' where the group co-creates a
learning 'channel' in the relative dynamical space, rather than dealing
with knowledge as an object.

anyhow, the conditions for the co-creatively shaped emergence of the
learning cell module 'never arrived' (it would have been cheating or
hypocritical to 'make it happen') and after a couple of years living in
downtown montreal, my intuition induced me to relocate back to the west
coast of canada to near where i grew up, not to the same place but to the
mysterious-for-me-as-a-child gulf islands offshore from the coastal
mainland where i had spent (or mispent) my youth, ... a region richly
immersed in the native american tradition, a tradition which in my view
embodies the fullblown essence of 'inclusionality', the recognition of the
dynamical interdependence of all things as implied in the 'relativity' of
poincare, lorentz and einstein as is incorporated in my notes such as the
one that amanda forwarded to you.   of course, cultures which exploit
naturally emergent resources without worrying about sustainability or
accommodative-assertive coresonance, such as our western culture can accrue
affluence and the power that comes with it, faster than sustainable
economies.  histories show that these self-centered exploitive empires are
not sustainable (they have no base of sustainability) and thus 'rise and
fall', leaving a scorched earth record in their wake.

the island social eco-culture that i am embedded and included within here
is again the underbelly of mainstream society, including people who are
periodically 'institutionalized' who are struggling to retain a sanity that
doesn't jibe with the so-called sanity of the mainstream that the
establishment is continually trying to 'return them to'.   the essays on my
website at www.goodshare.org are often on this theme.

so, 'inclusionality' is the bread of my daily existence and i involve
myself in the underbelly issues of this island community which has not
totally lost its innocence and trust (for example, when i first moved here
i was struck by an experience out of the past, ... driving through a dark
and lonely stretch of forest (the island residents have refused proposals
to put in street lighting because it interferes with star gazing) in the
pitch blackness at about 10 p.m. i stopped to give a ride to three teenage
girls who were hitch-hiking.   they happily jumped into my car, instantly
trusting me, a total stranger, laughing and joking amongst themselves and
with me, and i drove them to their destination a couple of miles further
on, where the forest opened up to a cluster of homes.  i hadn't seen the
likes of such an embodied innocence and trust on the mainland since the
1960s).

my pattern is to get up and get on the internet as i am doing right
now.  my correspondents include locals who are working on 'island trust'
community planning issues, and others who are simply 'trying to survive' in
a highly exclusionary society whose exclusionalist ethic (optimizing
individual performance) is slowing permeating the island communities
against the will of the underbelly residents.   central to my
correspondences is the inclusionality sharing circle of alan rayner, yvonne
aburrow and others who continue to work on 'inclusionality' while pursuing
their economic survival sustaining professional employments.

in my current 'inclusionalist' views, i no longer see the solutions to
emergent dissonance in the community as causally deriving from the quality
of the assertive behaviours of the individual constituents of community,
but from the manner in which we, as individuals, act relative to one
another.   those that object to this 'relative' mode of perception and
inquiry (not-caused by our individual assertive good-or-bad behaviours)
usually try to refute or mock it, often trying to put it down by focusing
on extreme 'bad behaviours' or extreme 'good behaviours', ... saying 'how
can you dispute the causally attributed 'good effect' or 'bad effect' of
such-and-such behaviour), .. but of course, i don't 'dispute it', ... i
simply see it as 'too small a view' to get to the essential issue of
'sustaining community harmony', the implied 'larger' view
of  'inclusionality' being something (essential to community harmony) that
most people ignore.   in a community whose constituents' behaviours are
characterized by the ethic of inclusionality, the prime goal is to let
one's behaviour be guided by the sustaining of accommodative-assertive
coresonance, as follows directly from the principle of relativity where
organizational harmony is a co-creatively shaped emergent behaviour in the
continuing present (there is no path to organizational harmony,
organizational harmony IS the path).

to let one's behaviour be guided by the sustaining of community harmony is
not equatable to 'philosophical relativism' as some would argue.  their
argument being based on the fact that inclusionality does not orient to
'good' or 'bad' behaviours, which means that the management schema does not
need to dependently reference to absolute definitions of 'good behaviour'
or 'bad behaviour', ... a condition that leads to the exclusionary tactics
that are the formal defaults of our western society and lead to
purificationism and optimization of the assertive behavioural performance
of individual systems (persons, organizations, nations) as if they were
dynamically 'independent', which they are not.  to move beyond hard
dependency on judgements of 'good' and 'bad' assertive behaviour doesn't
have to lead to the conclusion of free-floating subjectivity and 'anything
goes', however.  nature is non-judgemental but sustains
accommodative-assertive coresonance (community harmony) as is evident in
the collective dynamic of planets, moons and sun.

inclusionality recognizes 'good' or 'bad' assertive behaviours in the
larger context of sustaining community harmony.  for example, a high
performing organization can 'look good' though it is depleting the
'invisible value' of possibility/potentials that are embodied within the
dynamic of the collective and in so doing, inspire or incite 'bad
behaviours' on the part of those denied access to the possibilities and
potentials of the system.  thus the specifications, in absolute terms, of
'good assertive behaviour' and 'bad assertive behaviour', while they may be
useful guides, are not competent as foundations for community
harmony-sustaining management schemas, based as they are upon the FALSE
notion of the dynamical independence of the individual assertive agent.

so i involve myself in multiple real,
in-situ-in-the-dynamic-of-the-local-collective conversations that are
continously emerging in the present space-time of this island ecosystem,
evolving my understanding of inclusionality, ... codiscovering how to live
and how to express and share an awareness of it.

my experience informs me that awareness of inclusionality is bound up in
the narrative voice we use to inform ourselves about our life story (how we
are included in the enveloping organizational dynamic).  differences in
these narrative voices are well know in literature; i.e. there is the
self-consciousness oriented narrative of two-body dynamics in romantic
relationships; e.g. the narrative voice as used in james joyce's
short-story 'araby', ... there is the dream-consciousness oriented
narrative of existentialist angst where we realize the impossibility of
satisfying our included role in the complex multiconstituent dynamical web
of community through two-body relationships, as if the individual must be
guided by the causal impact of his purportedly independent assertings; e.g.
a narrative voice as used in franz kafka's short story 'the country
doctor', and there is the 'i am the dynamical web that i am included in'
existentialist-angst-relieving narrative of assumed multi-body
(simultaneous mutual influencing) dynamical interdependence; e.g a
narrative voice as used in jack hodgins short story 'after the
season'.  hodgins is a local vancouver island writer who imbues this sense
of nested inclusion (in the wilderness and in the wild socio-environmental
dynamic that nests within the wilderness)

within the dynamics of local community, the narrative voice that we use to
talk to ourselves and to one another shapes our collective behaviour and
sense of self.  whether as a person or as a member of an organization
(business or political organization such as community or nation), when we
use the cultural default of two body narrative where we see ourselves as
the causal authors, through our assertive behaviours viewed as
'independent' behaviours, of certain results, ... then we deceive ourselves
by this 'vanity' which ignores the over-riding influence of the invisible
value of space, the quality of possibility that emerges from the
three-body+ dynamics of simultaneous mutual influence.

the vanity of causal authorship of tangible results, which ignores the
fundamental enabling role of the continuously emerging open space
possibility that arises from how we act relative to one another (the
accommodative-assertive coresonant view of the dynamics of a collective),
is increasingly the source of dissonance and dysfunction.  'increasingly'
because what we used to do in an informal mutually self-helping mode
(accommodative-assertive mode) is increasingly being done by formal
organizations that orient to the optimization of their individual
assertive-behaviour based performance (letting accommodative-assertive
coresonance flap in the breeze, a recipe for disopportunization and
disenfranchisement of those sharing the dynamical commonspace but who are
not participants in the exclusionary behaviours of
independently-performance-optimizing organizations.)

so that',s about it for background on 'inclusionality' as my daily
bread.   here on the island, the residue of those with islander-ethics of
inclusionality, or mutual supportiveness where multiple participants
sustain moving under each other's simultaneous mutual influence in its
natural precedence rather than going with the unnatural inversion wherein
the optimization of individual performance takes precedence over the
co-creative sustaining of assertive-accommodative coresonance.

how to operationalize a means of inducing rising awareness to the hazards
of taking two-body narratives as being descriptive of the complex
multi-body reality we are included in, is an ongoing endeavor that i
continue to work within our 'inclusionality' sharing circles on.

hopefully this note gives you the 'flavour' of inclusionality as it
'tastes' to me in the continuing moment.

mitakuye oyasin,

ted



At 07:58 AM 3/21/04 -0500, Harrison Owen wrote:
>OK -- Supposing I wanted to know more about what you are doing? Website?
And
>I am just wondering how "inclusionality" tastes as that seems to be you
>source of daily bread. :-)
>
>Harrison
>
>Harrison Owen
>7808 River Falls Drive
>Potomac, Maryland   20845
>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
>OSLIST at LISTSERV.BOISESTATE.EDU
>To subscribe, unsubscribe, change your options, view the archives Visit:
>http://listserv.boisestate.edu/archives/oslist.html
>
>
>
>-----Original Message-----
>From: ted lumley [mailto:emiliano at goodshare.org]
>Sent: Sunday, March 21, 2004 2:59 AM
>To: Harrison Owen
>Subject: Re: Your paper Open Space and World Cafe
>
>
>hi harrison,
>
>other than moving into my third year of discovery of what its like to
>experience life on a small environmentally conscious island (pender island,
>b.c.), i am participating in a research circle with alan rayner and others
>in co-developing ways of expressing and sharing awareness of
>'inclusionality' - the natural primacy of dynamical space over the included
>dynamics of the material participants, the core theme of the discussion
>post that amanda passed to you.  (i.e. i am not currently engaging in any
>academic or revenue producing activity)
>
>thanks for your interest in the paper and its background context, and i'd
>be happy to share or engage further on issues of open space etc., should
>there be interest/opportunity.
>
>best regards,
>
>ted lumley
>
>
>At 04:41 PM 3/20/04 -0500, Harrison Owen wrote:
> >Amanda Bucklow passed you paper along to me. I found it delightful. What
> >else are you doing?
> >
> >Harrison
> >
> >Harrison Owen
> >7808 River Falls Drive
> >Potomac, Maryland   20845
> >Phone 301-365-2093
> >
> >Open Space Training www.openspaceworld.com
<http://www.openspaceworld.com/>
> >
> >Open Space Institute www.openspaceworld.org
> >Personal website http://mywebpages.comcast.net/hhowen/index.htm
> >OSLIST at LISTSERV.BOISESTATE.EDU
> >To subscribe, unsubscribe, change your options, view the archives Visit:
> >http://listserv.boisestate.edu/archives/oslist.html
> >
> >
> >

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