non-convergence and Chris's trip to New Zealand
Chris Corrigan
chris at chriscorrigan.com
Fri Mar 19 09:45:56 PST 2004
Thanks Daniel.I'll give you a call.I get into town Sunday afternoon
Chris
---
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
-----Original Message-----
From: OSLIST [mailto:OSLIST at LISTSERV.BOISESTATE.EDU] On Behalf Of daniel
lebel
Sent: Thursday, March 18, 2004 11:54 PM
To: OSLIST at LISTSERV.BOISESTATE.EDU
Subject: Re: non-convergence and Chris's trip to New Zealand
Well hello Chris,
I live 250 km from Nelson, going towards the wild westcoast in Westport
and you can ring anytime or come to visit or I might come up to Nelson
if you are not too busy and so on
and my number is 037895553
All the very best wishes for your visit.
Daniel LeBel
InterSpace
----- Original Message -----
From: Chris <mailto:chris at chriscorrigan.com> Corrigan
To: OSLIST at LISTSERV.BOISESTATE.EDU
Sent: Friday, March 19, 2004 7:58 AM
Subject: Re: non-convergence and Chris's trip to New Zealand
Mike:
I'll be in New Zealand starting Sunday.I leave tomorrow. I'll be in
Nelson the whole time.
Send me a number and I can call you.that goes for anyone else on the
South Island who wants to get together while I'm there.
Cheers,
Chris
---
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
-----Original Message-----
From: OSLIST [mailto:OSLIST at LISTSERV.BOISESTATE.EDU] On Behalf Of Mike
Copeland
Sent: Wednesday, March 17, 2004 6:48 PM
To: OSLIST at LISTSERV.BOISESTATE.EDU
Subject: Re: non-convergence
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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