[OSList] Boundaries

Fri Apr 11 10:56:37 PDT 2014

Outside of my skin, my body can no longer be responsible for life.  That doesn’t mean that I live in a vacuum or that everything outside of my skin is dead or that I am not a completely interdependent being.  It’s just that my heart powers this body and the responsibility for an effectiveness of that heart doing tha work ends at this skin.  

Chris 

On Apr 11, 2014, at 7:40 AM, Harold Shinsato <harold at shinsato.com> wrote:

> 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
>> 7808 River Falls Dr.
>> Potomac, MD 20854
>> USA
>> 
>> 189 Beaucaire Ave. (summer)
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>> 
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>> 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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> 
> 
> -- 
> Harold Shinsato
> harold at shinsato.com
> http://shinsato.com
> twitter: @hajush
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