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

Daniel Mezick dan at newtechusa.net
Wed Oct 30 07:04:48 PDT 2013 

Paul,

Thanks again for your series of posts.

In the book THE CULTURE GAME there is a chapter "Be Punctual"

There is also a chapter, "Open The Space", which of course includes the 
principle "Whenever it starts is the right time."

Oversimplifying here, I think most times, most groups in a meeting are 
doing either dialogue, or deciding, or are in some kind of transition 
from one to the other, along a gradient.

I currently believe:

  * In deciding-mode, punctuality can (and often must) be tightened up.
  * In dialogue-mode, punctuality usually needs to be relaxed to allow
    (much) more emergence.
  * The property of punctuality is a configurable design property. With
    it we can assign a range of say, 1 to 10 where 1 is "totally loose"
    and 10 is "totally strict."
  * How punctuality is configured all depends on the design goals for
    the experience under consideration.



On 10/30/13 6:55 AM, paul levy wrote:
> 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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