[OSList] Boundaries

[Michael Wood]

Chris,

Thanks for the clarity of your reflections Chris. What you said resonates with me and links, I think, to Harrison's proposition of the 'centripital' nature of self organisation - passion plus responsibility. In my case study that gave rise to this conversation, the 'boundaries' are related to many legal uncertainties which tend to impinge on conversations around 'responsibility'. For example,  'can we take responsibility for 'x' issue when the responsibility  for 'x', under the law,  is determined to lie elsewhere?  This seems to me to be a boundary issue which creates a lot of ambiguity in the centre of the circle. But I suppose that this is just the nature of life. Sometimes things (like the law) are unclear and we need to just get on with it and do the best we can under the conditions that present themselves, rather than the conditions that we'd ideally like. Similar to some recent conversations on this list about chaos in Syria and the Ukraine - which have much larger stakes than my little case study.

Michael Wood
Perth, WA

Message: 1
Date: Wed, 9 Apr 2014 19:40:59 -0700
From: chris.corrigan at gmail.com
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Subject: Re: [OSList] Open Space and boundaries
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I?m a little late to this and see that other threads have spun out but I have a thought or two.

Containers - social containers - are absolutely essential to any level of order.  Without something to contain the chaos you simply have chaos.  Order arises when there is coherence.  The coherence inside a container is different from the coherence or the chaos outside a container.  The place where this transition happens is the boundary.  The boundary may be permeable to various degrees but it is certainly real.  

As to how the boundary is created, I think my experience says that it is socially constructed.  It can be influenced by many actions - including intention, invitation, the nature of the shared culture within the container, and the action that is undertaken.  Open Space facilitators become helpful when we can work with this container.  

How do you do that?  In my experience, the most powerful and generative containers are those that gather around a centre, rather that those that are contained by a boundary.  

In practical terms what this looks like is simple: drop a powerful invitation into the centre of a group (passion and urgency) and a group will coalesce around that and ?fall in together.?  Your other option is to create a fence and gather people up and put them inside it.  This is much more work and rarely effective.  You have a container, but you also have a prison. 

When life gathers around a powerful centre you are invoking a pattern that is replicated at many scales all through the natural world from galaxies to atoms. The Milky Way is not a THING by virtue of someone maintaining a fence around it; it is a thing by virtue of proximity to it?s centre.  Same with an atom.  Same with social containers formed around invitation.

the Open Space facilitator?s job I think is to pay deep attention to the the centre of the work and to support a co-holding of thet centre with the calling team for whom the work is really important. When you start making rules about who is in and who is out, you are really getting lost in container making.  When you create just the right invitation, you feed the hunger for togetherness, work and creativity that is essential for Open Space - and any other generative, complex and self-organizing process - to thrive.  

Chris