[OSList] Boundaries

Harrison Owen hhowen at verizon.net
Fri Apr 11 07:01:13 PDT 2014


Michael -- I do believe that the truth of the matter is that when, as, or if
you ever discover a totally stable, unambiguous boundary that will be the
edge of a Dead Zone. Life is always a mess. :-)

ho

Harrison Owen
7808 River Falls Dr.
Potomac, MD 20854
USA

189 Beaucaire Ave. (summer)
Camden, Maine 04843

Phone 301-365-2093
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www.openspaceworld.com 
www.ho-image.com (Personal Website)
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-----Original Message-----
From: oslist-bounces at lists.openspacetech.org
[mailto:oslist-bounces at lists.openspacetech.org] On Behalf Of Michael Wood
Sent: Thursday, April 10, 2014 9:01 PM
To: 'oslist at lists.openspacetech.org'
Subject: [OSList] Boundaries

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 sta  kes 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
To: World wide Open Space Technology email list
	<oslist at lists.openspacetech.org>
Subject: Re: [OSList] Open Space and boundaries
Message-ID: <A7C0C272-AACB-42F7-A36A-7F2116434E5E at gmail.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=windows-1252

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
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