after OST

[Raffi Aftandelian]

HI all!
I have been playing around with the accounting metaphor that you use,
Harrison, in your user guide: that your wish for OST is for it to
become as ubiquitous and hohum (ok, that's my paraphrase!) as accounting is today.

OST has been around for some 20 years, right? That would mean it's
been around a *whole generation* (at least my 10th grade US history
teacher used to say that a generation was 19 years). On one level
that's a long time. On the other hand, that's a very short time.

I try to imagine what the world must have been like before accounting.
I wish I knew a little about the history of accounting. What did it
look like before there was accounting? What did the world look like
after the first 20 years of accounting? How did accounting develop in
the hundreds of years that followed? What might that development say
about how OST will develop hundreds of years down the line? Might that
metaphorical extrapolation be appropriate?

I am thinking back to the "halfway technology" thread of a few months
back. I followed it somewhat, and in the end it was not clear where it
went.

For me that thread was about: what is the work that OST leaves
unfinished?

In other words, gosh, OST has been around for 19 years, isn't it high
time something come on the block that could finish the work that OST
starts?

Is there anything around that finishes or suggests it can finish the
work that OST starts?

All of this brings up a whole host of questions that probably have
been asked many times, and I'll be so tedious as to pose them again:

If in our all too human drive for perfection (as imperfect as that
might be) we will eventually want and demand something after OST, what
would that be?

What work would a post-OST technology accomplish?

Is it appropriate to think in terms of the paradigm of a new
technology? Might that be too in-the-box thinking?

I think back to the Genuine Contact program. I think the program's
strength is that more than technologies, it offers an approach, an
approach that is felt and learned, not taught. Yes, the same may be
said about OST, but I don't think the way OST is disseminated right
now necessarily ensures a clear approach/values base (my wording is
not clear here; but I hope the intent behind my words is understood).

In other words, might it be that a post-OST something/somehow/someone
would be not a technology, not even an approach, something outside
Large Group Interventions?

Is there anything left to *be*/*do* necessarily after being in full open
space?

Have any answers been proposed already to these questions?

Might part of the answer possibly lie in marrying processwork with
OST? In unfolding our group dreaming in an awake state?

Are there assumptions

Or maybe it's too early to ask these questions. We need to wait for
the first yawn, perhaps? "Oh, yeah, another OST meeting coming up."

I think it'll possibly be a long long time (several lives?) before I
stop finding OST work satisfying, but, hey, I'm the Question Man
(college nickname).

Raffi

p.s. Oh, and one more flash-- I find it curious that about the time that
your self-published book Spirit: Transformation and Development in
Organizations came out in the mid-eighties, Harrison, I was your
virtual neighbor, living some 40 minutes from you in Bethesda,
attending Bethesda-Chevy-Chase (public) High School and learning
Russian (as I have told the story before) in open space.





--
Best regards,
 Raffi                          mailto:raffi at pochtamt.ru
                          mailto:raffi at bk.ru

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