[OSList] Exploring the Principles: Whenever it starts is the right time

[paul levy]

Sharing one more of three. Your comments and insights most welcome...

warm wishes

Paul Levy





We can become trapped by all kinds of dogma in our lives. One of them is
start times. Businesses clock people in and out and there are sanctions for
poor timekeeping. We grow up with school timetables and many of us probably
remember being told off or even punished for being late to class.

In music, if the orchestra doesn’t start together, the music will not sound
pleasant! Yet, in purely  improvised jazz, anyone can start. We join in as
and when.

In open space, we are encouraged not to get hung up over time. When it
starts is when it is meant to start. The dogma of starting on time is a
dogma of forcing. It becomes another imposed structure. It might turn out
we all do turn up for a session bang on time and start bang on time as
well. Or it might be that some pre-start chit-chat turns out to be just the
buzz needed for us to start a little later.

The start time of an open space session is not set and imposed. The start
time in the agenda is an intention at the time the session is offered. “I’d
like to offer a session on Time Management in the Red Room at 11am. The
time set is experienced as true at the time it is set. And, already the
world has changed; we have moved on, the narrative may shift significantly.
One session may over-run and the follow-on session may wait for those
people, or may not. The right time emerges out of the need of the moment.

This can and does free us up. It offers the chance to be lazily late, or to
simply allow the time to start to emerge as needed by the situation. What
stops this principle descending into a lazily, chaotic programme? According
to Jack Martin Leith, one of the few people who has ventured to critique
open space, it all comes down to awareness. At an open space event there is
a collective responsibility to be aware of the reason the Open Space event
was created and also of the other people attending: “I believe that each
participant should maintain awareness of these outcomes throughout the
conference. This awareness should extend to the conscious use of time and
space, such as starting meetings on time (because people are aware that
time is limited) and not letting them overrun (because they are aware that
other people need the space).” (Reference, with case examples,  here -
http://www.jackmartinleith.com/more-effective-ost-and-rtsc/)

Start time should never be a rule; it is more of an impulse. It’s often
remarkable how, on reflection, allowing the start time to “show itself”, is
often viewed afterwards as just the right time to start.

This doesn’t come easy to those addicted to structure, those who need to
know what lies up ahead in the fixed plan. It comes easier to those who
like to go with the flow, who like to improviser, and also those who are
lazy and also those who are relaxed. Different cultures treat start times
differently and open space conferences that involve a meeting of different
cultures can really show these different views and behaviours in action.

“Whenever it starts is the right time” isn’t an invitation to be lazy with
time, nor to never agree a start time and stick to it. It is an invitation
to view start times as emergent.

A group or community, in open space, can often sense together when
something needs to start. And that isn’t always the time stated in the
programme.

When we live by the principle “whenever it starts is the right time” in
open space, we give permission to others to flow in their own way. We give
them space to be, and in doing that, we also give the community space to be
an, as a result, space for possibility opens more easily. There’s another
side to this coin: When a group meets in a circle (physical or symbolic) or
a conversation or to do work together, a collective responsibility can
form. The group becomes an organism, even as it is made up for individuals.
The group can find, often without words, the right time to start. One
person can take the needed in-breath, and then we all start to sing.
Sometimes we all breath together. This is captured beautiful in the words
of philosopher, Rudolf Steiner:

“A healthy social life is found only, when in the mirror of each soul the
whole community finds its reflection, and when in the whole community the
strength of each one is living.”

So, the right time to start can be born from one person’s impulse, from the
nod between two people, or even from the synchronicity of the whole group.

There’s a lovely paradox here that many open space facilitators have failed
to understand. Some people hold firmly to a start time and attempt to
uphold it. They create a dogma out of the start time. And this is also
fine. If an individual manages to persuade or even cajole an entire room
into starting at a fixed time, then this is the right time to start, if the
people in the room follow that lead. Along the line of “it starts when it
starts” and “it starts in exactly three an a half minutes” are all kinds of
people, will impulses and skills of assertiveness. To impose the principle
as a rule that excludes time fixedness is as bad as excluding the principle
itself. So some sessions will start just as planed earlier in the day, down
to the last second and others won’t. And both are perfectly lovely.
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