Open Space Organizations
Ralph Copleman
rcopleman at comcast.net
Sun Jul 16 04:51:50 PDT 2006
I heard this story a little while back from my friend Susan Coleman...
It seems there is an organization in New York City that more or less falls
into the category of open space organization.
Several years ago, during the Clinton presidency in the US, our State
Department hired an institute at Columbia University in New York that
specializes in this sort of thing to conduct a training program in peaceful
conflict resolution with a group of Kurds from Northern Iraq. Susan, who
was closely connected to the institute landed the contract to do the
five-day training. The first three days offered content, role play and more
on the nature and experience of the topic. Susan hired me to open space for
the final two days of the event to give the 25 or so participants an
opportunity to work together and experiment with their new understandings
and behaviors in a real way.
I reported on this whole event here some years back, so I¹ll skip the
details. (And no, sadly, I do not have a copy of that long-ago posting.)
But here¹s the heart of what Susan recently told me...
During the event, we used a stone as the talking symbol, something I picked
up off the ground in a nearby park. At the conclusion of the event, we
awarded the stone to a young graduate student at Columbia who had done all
the legwork of getting the participants out of Iraq, through customs in
Turkey, and safely to the US. She was their organizer, chaperone,
ambassador, go-between, and tireless worker for the idea of cooperation and
peace.
She graduated and moved on, I believe, but she bequeathed the stone to the
institute at Columbia.
And now, if I have it right, the staff of the institute has learned how to
open space for its work, conducts all its meeting in this format, and always
employs the same stone as its talking symbol.
Can we call this truly an open space organization? Are there others out
there?
Ralph Copleman
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