Some Feedback please!

[Harrison Owen]

Martin -- Interesting project, but I have never found any need for trust
building exercises or anything of the sort. Even in situations of positive
non-trust, call it enmity and anger. For example in all the years that I
worked with my friends in Israel and Palestine -- where a whole mess of
people were pretty sure that they were going to get shot by somebody all we
ever did was sit in a circle, create a bulleting board, open a market place,
and get out of the way. All the rest was "standard Open Space." Of course it
could get a little tense at times, but that turned out to be the heat of
passion constrained and denied. But when given the space, good things
happened. You may recall the OS in Rome with the 50 Palestinians and
Israelis. http://openspaceworld.com/opening_space_for_peace.htm 

We never went for the easy/safe issues. Not too much passion there! Go for
the hard ones and for sure the people who come will be the people who care,
and it is from their caring that new, useful organizations and opportunity
will emerge (Nexus of Caring). All the rest really don't care that much
which is a good reason for them not to come.

And so for your people who might be turned off and not come because they are
afraid somebody might steal their business. I wouldn't worry about them. You
really don't want them anyhow. Besides if their business is so good that
they can afford to hide it they will have little use for the whole gathering
and will provide limited benefit to the group. 

Harrison

 
 
Harrison Owen
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-----Original Message-----
From: OSLIST [mailto:OSLIST at LISTSERV.BOISESTATE.EDU] On Behalf Of Martin
Mayer
Sent: Wednesday, July 29, 2009 5:06 AM
To: OSLIST at LISTSERV.BOISESTATE.EDU
Subject: Some Feedback please!

Dear all,

I want to use Open Space to help people creating new organisations. I 
have met a lot of people who want to become self employed or to create 
their own organisations. But many of them struggle. They have a specific 
expertise and want to set up a business with it. But running a business 
requires a broader range of knowledge than they have, e.g. bookkeeping, 
sales, creating a product etc.. Many are specialists in one area. I 
realised that often their skills complement each other. They could be 
more successful if they cooperated.

My plan is to bring them together in an Open Space to discuss their 
ideas and to find out, how they could cooperate. But it turns out that 
many hesitate to follow the invitation to Open Space because they fear 
that their business idea could be "stolen" there. Or in other words, 
they have low trust into the other participants.

I wonder if it is possible to help develop more trust in an self 
organising way. Which means to create circumstances which make trust 
possible, just as Open Space creates circumstances which make self 
organised conversations possible.

Harrison writes in Wave Rider that a nexus of caring corresponds to the 
strange attractor in chaos theory. It helps to let Open Space events 
happen or correspondingly to let order appear from chaos. He also says: 
"The jump from the very limited situation of an Open Space event into 
the infinitely larger realm of human systems of all sizes is 
considerable, to say the least."

This arises some questions for me. Do we need other or additional 
strange attractors to help self organised organisations to emerge? Is it 
possible that trust is this strange attractor? And can we help it to 
develop? If so, how?

I appreciate your comments, ideas or suggestions.

 From sunny Munich
Martin

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