[OSList] Boundaries

Harold Shinsato harold at shinsato.com
Fri Apr 11 07:40:39 PDT 2014


Interesting that the outer edge of the skin of our bodies skin is in 
fact, dead cells.

On 4/11/14 8:01 AM, Harrison Owen wrote:
> 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
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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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-- 
Harold Shinsato
harold at shinsato.com <mailto:harold at shinsato.com>
http://shinsato.com
twitter: @hajush <http://twitter.com/hajush>
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