What I have learned (re-updating)

[JL Walker B.]

What I begin to post below from the third paragraph to the penultimate, I
have wrote it on May 2005 and I have never send it to the list because I
considered was not finished. And then I hope you must suppose what happens,
making it shortly, the issue is that all the excuses are perfect.

But now with this productivity and extrovertly summer reaction, things are
becoming too much different. So up to once let’s go to the point and
transcript the old notes, which I think even if it would repeat some
experiences that I have already told you, I hope it supplies some knew
insights about me and my experience with OST, and recognize what should be
recognized.

So I begin those notes saying: This is a short version so I’ll not be more
obsessive expecting to write the all thing (now it sounds ironic).

First of all I have learned what is the meaning of gratitude after knowing
all of you and especially to Harrison Owen for the openness, leadership and
permanently support he delivered to me with so much kind of generosity.

The same recognition goes to Karen Davis for being the first person to whom
I have heard of and experienced a very short version of Open Space
Technology, in one of her journey to Chile and consequent visit to Juanita
Anguita, to which consulting team (Anguita & Asociados) I belong until 1998.

>From that time to my debut facilitating OST in May 2002, seems that the
seed was waiting on my heart. It was my most appreciated client that in
some way becomes the rain that makes that seed germinate. That experience I
offered to all of you by the Oslist, in my article wrote with Fernando
Rouliez and called “The Change is like the Water” (or Spirit and Liturgy on
Essco S.A.).

>From that wonderful moment to now, the most important things of my
professional (and personal) life are crossing throw this marvelous gift of
getting the opportunity to be a facilitator of an Open Space.

The journey had been amazing and the image that most sense gives to me is
that one of the lotto flower opening on the mess, which sometime ago I have
read it from Chris Corrigan.

So much synchrony in “the right time” and co-relations with my personal
growth. Perhaps it would not have been the same if I simultaneously didn’t
learn how to meditate daily and become also more open in my inner space.
Getting that sweet calm and harmony that also flows in the OST events, when
people let happens the only thing that could happens.

Another important kind of learning has come from my friends and colleagues
in Chile, to whom I have spread by contagion all of this enthusiasm and
confidence with this approach like the most potent method to aboard their
clients. That was the case especially with Jorge Amigo, I invite him to use
the methodology and he invites me to co-facilitate the events with his
clients. The know-how learning here has been amazing in a multiple
facilitator role.

My collaboration with Amigo Consultores Ltda., the firm of Jorge which I’m
working for, has provided to me the opportunity to participate in three
projects with three important public organization, where OST has been the
principal methodology. Product of that we have co-facilitated twenty-six
OST events, covering approximately three thousands publics officers and
workers of all the organizational levels.

Without doubt, talking about all of the learning and changes that in those
experiences had happened, at the very least merit a book. In an effort of
synthesis I would have to say that OST had proved to me that it is the most
powerful method for touching the heart of the people, giving them a felt-
sense of the essential practices that the public management modernization
process implies.

In two of these three projects we have been working with the same principal
public authority, which also was the sponsor and the best participant of
each OST event. I hope I’m very lucky to work in that conditions and the
insights and learning from his leadership had also been amazing.

The first time he was closing the circle at the end of the very first
event, he talked to people that “this methodology had permitted us bringing
the radicality of democracy to our organization”.

Now when we are in front of new challenges with this third project, in an
important repartition of the Republic, he has said at the closed circle of
the first event, something like this:

“The structure of this organization it’s collapsed. Simply it doesn’t fit
with all the challenges from the future. So or we change it or we die. I
have some ideas of what it has to become, and I have communicated it to you
and to all the public opinion. How would we do it I really don’t know and I
think that the structure in last terms is not the most important. What I’m
sure is that for making it possible we should work just like here in this
event we were doing it, in this sort of relationship and conversation.
Truly this is the most important issue, and all together we have to obtain
it.”

Up to here I have wrote the never-send-it mail to the Oslist on May 2005.
Now that I re-discovery it in my computer, I become conscious of how this
writing was an input of my fantasy expressed on “Juan Luis’s story”
recently. The words that I have really heard it to this important public
authority quoted above, was practically the same that, so pretentiously, I
have put it on the mouth of the President of The Republic in my fantasy.
This my friends, I think at least makes my vision a little bit more
possible.

To be continued.

Juan Luis Walker

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