Going underground as facilitator - Follow-up

[Chris Corrigan]

Yes Marc...that is exactly what I'm talking about...the field holding the
field.

Chris

On Tue, Jul 15, 2008 at 12:35 PM, Marc Steinlin (I-P-K)
<marc.steinlin at i-p-k.ch> wrote:

> Thanks Chris for this answer, which is very insightful for me! Very
> appreciated!
> In particular your first answer made me realising one thing:
>
> KM4Dev is a great (and big: more than 600 members on the mailing list!)
> community, functioning for about 8 years. In the meeting a month ago, about
> 1/3 of the participants were newcomers, and 1/3 had only participated in 1
> or max 2 meetings. Only a handful of people knew each other for several
> years. And in general we only meet once a year, with some (sometimes more,
> sometimes less) interaction over the mailing list. So how could there be a
> "deep underlying and pre-existing architecture of relationships and
> collaboration" as you put it - as a precondition for letting go entirely?
>
> I tend to believe that I find the answer in the second part of your
> paragraph:
>
> In other words, at large levels of scale within organizations or
> communities, the act of holding space is actually all about attending to the
> relationships of the group of people that are holding the deepest intention
> for the work.  In an organizational development context this means that the
> core team spends a great deal of time working on its own relationships and
> in so doing, they are able to hold space for the bigger field of learning.
>
>
> In KM4Dev, we have a small core group of very passionate and committed
> people, maybe 10-15, who interact closely on a regular basis. We, well, we
> don't exactly know what we do and in particular we don't know how we do it.
> We somehow try to probably hold space for the community at large, we discuss
> certain steering issues, we decide where to hold our next meeting and we
> find people to organise it. We tried to figure out how we actually make
> decisions and found that we have some weird procedure of someone making a
> proposition, and if nobody opposes, then that's decided - very organic and
> self-organised, I guess.
>
> It occurs to me that that very core group makes everything possible by
> fostering and strengthening its own relationships on the small scale, thus
> allowing the community at large to be one with a "deep underlying and
> pre-existing architecture of relationships and collaboration". That makes
> absolutely sense to me and it feels like it hits the nail on the head.
> Thanks for that insight!
>
> I will share it with the core group... ;-)
>
> -marc
>


CHRIS CORRIGAN
Facilitation - Training - Process Design
Open Space Technology

Weblog: http://www.chriscorrigan.com/parkinglot
Site: http://www.chriscorrigan.com

Principal, Harvest Moon Consultants, Ltd.
http://www.harvestmoonconsultants.com

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