Author: Michael

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Inviting Leadership

…or maybe less. Still tinkering with language for expressing the essence of what Chris and I have been calling the Four Practices of Open Space, or Four Practices of Inviting Leadership. Here’s where I’m settling out today:

1. Embracing Heart… is about opening to the heart of issues, the passion in people, and the depth of what is really going on in an organization, a situation or a body. It’s a willingness to take things in and feel them deeply, as opposed to holding them away for detached analysis and objective study. It’s about feeling into the pulse of things, the flow of things, and connecting with that pulse and flow, giving and receiving. It’s being in touch with what we love, what we want, and why we do what we do. And being willing to embrace others, as well. It’s a willingness to acknowledge, appreciate and embrace what is really happening, to cut the crap and deal with core issues. It’s as much a being, warmth and opening, as a doing. If this practice was a sound, it might be “Aaahhh…”, the sound of satisfying.

2. Inviting Focus… is about calling, being called and calling attention, seeing clearly and being able to articulate where we’ve been, where we are, what needs to come next, what is trying to emerge, what people are needing and wanting to create. It’s about bringing people and ideas together, inviting and allowing new patterns to emerge, new things to happen, next steps to be taken, within the bounds of a history, a culture, a purpose or process. It’s about the fine line and leading edge, between what we know and have, and what we need, to explore, address, or resolve. This practice acknowledges choice, that everybody has it, already… and invites conscious choosing. It’s about naming issues and opportunities, choices and challenges, boundaries and resources, dates and times, meeting places and purposes. Being an inviting focus must have something to do with the intensity of our inquiry into how things are, where they are heading, and how they might be shaped. The sound of this practice might be “Hmmm…”, the beginning of a question.

3. Supporting Flow… is about holding space, opening space, for people and information to move, to connect, to exchange, unfold and emerge. It’s about letting go, in the sense of letting things go forward, move and develop. This practice builds and maintains structures — rules, tools, technologies and processes — that open and hold space for moving, connecting, and exchanging. It tests boundaries, stretches limits, and cuts through delays and red tape — but it goes beyond problem-solving. It wants to create whole new ways of working, where everything moves freer, faster and easier, together. Everything depends on and from everything else, like the movement of people, prices and goods in a marketplace. This practice supports the spaces, conference rooms, church basements, weblogs, email listserves, off-site meetings, working lunches, team coffee breaks that make it possible to keep work moving and get things done. The sound here might be silence, the sound of space.

4. Making Good… is about showing up, making deliveries, return on investment, learning and contributing, making good on promise and promises, the care, openings and assistance that others give us, and that which we have pledged to them. It wants to make a real difference, do something that counts, which is different from something that we can count. It’s not about the data, it’s about the doing — the little things that make us powerful as people and organizations. There is no way to account for how many promises are kept in an organization, but everyone knows and talks about promises broken, and promise wasted. This practice is about grounding and lightness, a felt sense of traction, ease and power. It’s about claiming power, acknowledging our responsibility, and take care of what we love, taking the steps that make good on what is. “Oh!” …the sound of realizing.

Note that this is the first post in a new category, Inviting Leadership. Previous work on this topic has been most but not all of what I’ve been calling Practice.

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Surreality Bites?

Susan Walker quoted historian John Brooks last week in The Daily Reckoning:

[It] came with a kind of surrealistic slowness … so gradually that, on the one hand, it was possible to live through a good part of it without realizing that it was happening, and, on the other hand, it was possible to believe one had experienced and survived it when in fact it had no more than just begun.

He was writing about how it felt to live during the Great Depression, 1929-1933. She was writing about US housing markets these days. I wonder if it might not apply more broadly than that.

At what point does not knowing become worse that any one of the possible outcomes? Isn’t that the moment when the next big things really get to begin? The moment when we finally decide? And what if some billions would decide all at once?

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Sensations of Practice, and Not

…thinking about the somatic, felt sensations that seem to be associated with the various practicings and not practicings raised in the last couple of posts…

appreciating has the sensation of vastness, and depth
inviting has the sensation of opening, and focus
support has the sensation of holding, and movement
making good has the sensation of grounding, and lightness

i notice that we need to be able to do and sense two states at once with these things. not sure i can map how the anti-practices feel, but must include churning, tangling, blocking, stuck, broken, and wasting… or maybe eventually just numbed.

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Not the Four Practices, Again

Try on this updated version of the four “anti-practices” suggested in the last post…

  • Analyzing, the opposite of Appreciating;
  • Facilitating, the opposite of Inviting;
  • Problem-Solving, the opposite of Supporting; and
  • Making a Good Case, the opposite of Making Good.

Yes, I think that Inviting might just be the opposite of the sort of facilitation that coddles, protects, defends, assures, and tries to make sure that everyone gets to speak… and that everyone else has to listen to them. This might explain why some really good facilitators struggle so mightily with Open Space Technology.

Fixing might be generalized to problem-solving in general, and problem-finding in daily practice. ‘Nuf said.

And then, Making a Good Case wants to suggest that the opposite of Good is Best, as Making the Good Case so often means proving and assuring we have and have done what’s Best. This one might end up being called Making Sacrifices, as so much life energy and good work is lost, or wasted, in the process — sacrificed in the name of Best Practices and Measurable Certainty. How much is wasted making sure, , instead of just making good. We chase the ultimate sure thing, free lunch, perfect fit, and best practice — in exchange for the good life we already have and can practice every day — just in case. Maybe it would be more to the point to just say Making Excuses, which happens whenever we don’t think we’re doing good.

OR: How about Playing it Safe?

Nah… I think it’s Making Excuses.

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Not the Four Practices

Chris Corrigan and I have been refining our thinking and language for open space leadership. We have it down to four inter-informing and inter-supporting practices: Appreciating, Inviting, Supporting and Making Good.

While the practices themselves are each quite whole and robust, tolerant of description but not of disecting, that’s not actually how it is when we try to practice them as bodies. Incarnation is more discrete. On and off, in or out, dead or alive, male or female. More or less. Appreciating, Inviting, Supporting and Making Good.

So it occurs to me that naming their opposites, daring to notice their dual nature, one might say… could be helpful. Here are my proposals:

  • Analyzing, the opposite of Appreciating;
  • Protecting, the opposite of Inviting;
  • Fixing, the opposite of Supporting; and
  • Wasting, the opposite of Making Good.

These four meet two criteria for me. First, they are sort of obvious literal opposites of our four practices. More importantly, I have some felt sense of what each actually feels like. I can feel when I am doing them. This matters, because it means that I can feel when I’m not doing them. It’s great to notice when I am practicing well, but perhaps more important to be able to notice when I’m losing my way.

I can hear them, too, in the language of colleagues and clients. I know Appreciation gets things moving and I can hear others talk about the “paralysis of analysis.” I know that when people resist using Open Space Technology, they often explain their resistance in terms of protecting others. Or they attempt “modified open space” and speak explicity about fixing and improving the experience of their colleagues. And I hear people decrying business as usual as a waste of time, waste of money, and wasted chances to do good. So these are things I find in the territory, not theories I’m making up out of nothing.

I should add that it’s not that we should stop doing these opposite things altogether, but rather be more conscious of our habits, assumptions, and balance about these things. These opposites have their place and value. And they are all very well supported in western, industrial cultures. The new practices are not. So it’s the balance we need to reconsider, each of us personally, consciously, actively.

These four words aren’t magic, any more than the last four were magic — and I haven’t worked out the all the details. But somehow the marriage of these opposites, the rebalancing, or mutuality of them, allows us to handle in local, personal ways the enormity of what Dave Pollard and author Derrick Jensen are talking about?

Thoughts?

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Mutuality in Markets and Meetings

Bloomberg’s Caroline Baum sums it up the recent market movements pretty well yesterday:

Copper up, stocks down, bonds down. No, wait, it’s copper down, stocks down, bonds up. Can someone please help me get a handle on these inter-market relationships?

As I think about movements and relationships, in markets and in open space meetings …and organizations …and communities… I notice that I can indeed understand, or at least explain to myself, why things are happening. I can know, too, what is is happening now, and even what is happening next. The challenge is knowing what to do — because these two kinds of knowing, what is happening and why it’s happening — seem to happen in two different sides of brain or, perhaps more accurately still, in brain and in heart. Brain can’t really calculate what comes next. And heart can’t explain it.

What Julie Henderson calls “mutuality” is a practice in letting other(s) be as real to us as we are to ourselves. Chris Corrigan and I have been teaching Open Space and Inviting Leadership as the practice of being mutually aware of self and group, or self and organization, letting body be source of information about how I am as well as how “we” are. Today I’m remembering that this same sort of mutual awareness scales down, to where I can know what is really happening and why it is happening, simultaneously. When I can do this, I make better decisions, wise and kind, in markets and meetings.

What’s that you say, “Kind decisions? In the currency markets?” Ah yes, even in something as apparently solid, objective, measurable as trading, there is room for kindness. So easy to second guess oneself, destroy confidence, grow fear, lose focus and money and more. And, of course, it’s always dangerous to argue with a market.

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The Open Space that I Am

Alison Murdoch sent word yesterday of the upcoming Essential Education conference in California, October 2006. The announcement came with an invitation to volunteers for website maintenance. Later in the day, Julie Henderson asked about adding some photos to the Zapchen Somatics site. I said yes, both times, and then got back to work on updating the Imagine Chicago site for Bliss Browne. All of this after I talked with Rebecca Blazer and Marissa Strassel, walking them through the new weblog we are starting for the Chicago Conservation Corps. Late last night, I posted a note from Roq Gareau into the writing notebook, not yet public, where Chris Corrigan and I are developing our book on Inviting Leadership.

Depending on how you count them, I am working on eight to ten different websites, many but not all of them weblogs. Today, I can see them clearly as working conversations and overlapping groups of colleagues. It’s easy to imagine the lot of them as so many flipcharts and breakout groups scattered around a big meeting room. Some of them are sites of active documentation. Some of them don’t get much writing but do mark and hold a space for our meeting. A few of them have side conversations going on, a listserve or or sub-site, nearby. In all cases, I care about about the issues: education, philanthropy, community, environment, food, well-being — and the opportunities to connect these conversations with each other. It strengthens me to see that I am indeed walking my talk… noticing, inviting, documenting, and doing. Open Space Practice and Open Space World.

Between clicks on all of these websites yesterday, I got an urgent email from a friend and coaching client. “On my way to an open space client meeting. Need to talk, if you can.” It turns out that he’s been doing quite a lot of work in Open Space, and he mentions something about using it in more and more different places, and discovering that “it” can work in all of them. The way he said “it” really caught me and I see: “it” is “me”. Open Space isn’t an abstract or academic process. It’s personal. It’s me appreciating, inviting, supporting, and making good on the issues and opportunities that matter to me. We say that Open Space can work in so many different situations, and now I see that the real limit or caveat, the qualification that could be added is this: Open Space can work anywhere, on any issue, and with any people that I/you/we can genuinely appreciate. In other words, IF you can find some good in the situation, there is always some way to invite, support and make more of it.

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Transformative Mediation

The Institute for the Study of Conflict Transformation’s 2nd International Conference is coming up in September, in St. Paul, MN. The theme is Purpose Drives Practice: An International Conference on Transformative Mediation.

I’ll be presenting a workshop on Open Space Technology on the first day and will be a featured panelist in the closing plenary. I’m looking forward to a fascinating couple of days of connecting the Tranformative Framework and Open Space.

The transformative framework was first articulated by Robert A. Baruch Bush and Joseph P. Folger in The Promise of Mediation in 1994. Since then, transformative theory and practice has grown and is used in mediation, facilitation, and conflict management training all over the world.In the transformative view, conflict is primarily about human interaction rather than “violations of rights” or “conflicts of interest”. Conflict is part of the basic dynamic of human interaction in which people struggle to balance concern for self with connections to others. When this balance is upset, human interaction becomes alienated and destructive, simply put there is a crisis in human interaction.

Specifically, the occurrence of conflict tends to destabilize the parties’ experience of both self and other, so that each party feels both more vulnerable and more self-absorbed than they did before the conflict. Further, these negative attitudes often feed into each other on all sides as parties interact, in a vicious circle that intensifies each party’s sense of weakness and self-absorption. As a result, the interaction between the parties quickly degenerates and assumes a mutually destructive, alienating, and dehumanizing character.

For most people, according to the transformative theory, being caught in this kind of destructive interaction is the most significant negative impact of conflict. However, the transformative framework posits that, despite conflict’s natural destabilizing impacts on interaction, people have the capacity to regain their footing and shift back to a restored sense of strength or confidence in self (the empowerment shift) and openness or responsiveness to the other (the recognition shift). Moreover, these positive moves also feed into each other on all sides, and the interaction can therefore regenerate and assume a constructive, connecting, and humanizing character. The model assumes that this transformation of the interaction itself is what matters most to parties in conflict — even more than resolution on favorable terms.

Pre-Conference Workshops and Trainings will be held Sept. 15-16, 2006, and Main Conference Sept. 17-18. I’ll be presenting a workshop on the 17th and will be a featured panelist on the 18th. Conference Brochure or Online Registration

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Clarity as Flow

My recent learning and practice is mostly about clearing and balancing myself more easily in the flow of things, allowing myself to be carried along my the waves that are already moving, while minimizing the amount of personal and direct efforting.  Chris would say I’m practicing as coho salmon, which uses pressure of local water flows to move it around, rather than swimming by pulling against the water.

I’ve been paying extra attention to the pressure differentials between the flows of global and local connectings, individual experience and budding coupledom (wedding countdown, five weeks), the art of a book emerging in the midst of business administrivia, online technology and face-to-face connection, dollar and non-dollar investments, friends and colleagues, long-term planning and moment-to-moment ease and practice as a body.

All a practice in mutuality, holding, balancing, and supporting two or more states or scopes or ways of knowing, letting each be distinct and valuable, informed and informing, by each or all of the others.  Clarity, it seems, is as much about not scraping my feet through the silty bottom as it is about any sort of efforting to make the water clearer.  Letting the flow be as real as the ground.

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Practice Receiving, Too

My friend Karen Sella, reflecting on the other side of inviting after our recent leadership practice retreat on Bowen Island…

My approach to open space—and life in general (sometimes this distinction seems irrelevant)—is about receiving as much as inviting—receiving what is offered; what wants to be received. Whenever I open space, I invite people to consider that each person in the space is a gift just waiting to be received. All we have to do is open our bodies, hearts and minds to receiving each other. If we do nothing else, that will have been profound—indeed, sometimes, that’s the most profound thing that we can do, a prerequisite for everything else.

She’s also just spiffed up her Luminalogue weblog. It’s one of those gifts just waiting to be received!

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Can the Fed Save Us?

Watching global market turbulence this last week, looking for clues. This bit from John Hussman, Why the Fed is Irrelevant, rings even truer today that when he wrote it in 2001…

…if you look at the statistical evidence, the relationship between monetary growth and inflation is very weak. Instead, our research indicates that inflation is primarily the result of growth in unproductive forms of government spending (basically defense spending, entitlements and other expenditures that fail to stimulate the supply of goods). The evidence both from the U.S. and other countries clearly demonstrates this relationship.

As Milton Friedman has noted, the burden of government is not measured by how much it taxes, but by how much it spends . The impact is particularly severe when growth in entitlements is high and growth in productivity is low. This is why inflation exploded after the late 60’s, and why it came down after the early 1980’s. This is why the Germans suffered hyperinflation after World War I when its government decided to keep paying workers who had gone on strike.

Always and everywhere, rapid inflation is produced by excessive creation of government liabilities without a corresponding increase in the amount of goods produced by the economy. The Fed doesn’t control this. It doesn’t even matter much what form the liabilities take. If the Germans had decided to issue bonds to striking workers instead of money, bond prices would have been driven to ridiculously low levels, driving interest rates to extremely high levels, creating an unwillingness to hold non-interest bearing money, resulting in a rapid deterioration in the value of money, and hyperinflation just the same.

Uh-oh.

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Lunch with Shilpa Jain

Today was a rare treat, lunch with my friend Shilpa Jain. Rare because she lives in India, Udaipur to be exact. Once upon a time we ran a few days of Open Space Technology training together, for her organization, Shikshantar, the People’s Institute for Rethinking Education and Development.

My favorite of all the stories we told today was of a week-long bicycle trip 14 colleagues did last October in India — without cash. They rode out, with signs, juggling gear, sleeping pads, jewelry making tools and no food on their bicycles.

The signs invited conversation. The other stuff was some of what they used to survive… by offering entertainment, cleaning, carrying, and other “body labor” along the way, bridging the gap between urban and rural people, and learning a lot about simple, human relations, economics, exchange, humility and power. I think the humility of the endeavor is most impressive for me.

Shikshantar is doing community work with zero-waste and organic urban gardening. I shared my new Nestworking experiment and Shilpa has connected me with somebody here in town working on community gardens.

Finally, Shilpa brought me a copy of Expressions Annual 2005, a journal recently published by abhivyakti.org.in in which Shilpa interviews me about Open Space. Dialogue, walking, film-making, cooperative games, and a piece by Juanita Brown on World Cafe are also featured this year.

Jill and I are hoping to meet up with Shilpa in Udaipur this Fall, but likely not for the next cashless bike/work tour. Guess we’ll just have to organize our own tour here in Chicago!

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Making Good

From Toke Moller’s paper “What Gifts Could Learning and Courage Bring Our Societies?”, via Christy:

Here are some of my assumptions about creating learning space and starting conversations that matter…

  • In this time, the ways in which we are together have become very speedy, uninspired and often unconscious of what is really meaningful to us – this gives us little space to be present in the Now – to be present to ourselves and each other.
  • When we open space and time to each other around our own meaning, inspiration and consciousness is already there to greet us.
  • We need to be fully present, connected to ourselves and each other, to have the inspiration and courage to know and decide what to create and do at this time, that will benefit all and not just me…..
  • I cannot give if I do not have the surplus of love, challenge and freedom in human community with others.
  • Life wants to give its best to what is alive and let die what is no more needed.
  • When I let myself become the dialogue, the process and the learning I am in, that experience gives birth to conscious action ……..that will make a difference.

Making a difference. Making appearances, deliveries, investments, and contributions. Making peace. Making it real, making it count. All making good, on promise and promises. Making a new title for this blog, you may have noticed, reflecting and inviting all of the above.

Making a small celebration here, as Friday is this (whatever it’s called) blog’s 3rd birthday. Certainly it’s made a difference for me, and I hope, perhaps a little bit for you and some others. Thanks for your company here.

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“Nestworking”

I take it as a good wedding omen that it just gets harder and harder to be away from home.

I’m done now with travel (I think) for the next couple of months and it feels really good to be home. So I’m starting a new practice, which I’m calling Nestworking, an inverted or locally-focused sort of networking.

For years, I’ve been expanding a global network of friends and colleagues. Now I want to actively request the good people I know around the world to connect me with interesting people they know or meet from Chicago. In this way, I want to turn my network back in on itself, and use it to help me find others who are active in global conversations — AND living and working here in town.

Mostly we think of extending networks, but this is a sort of local thickening, the practice of which has been new to everyone I’ve asked about it. Seems promising in a region of eight million or more people. I want to find those who live simultaneously in Chicago and in bigger global circles.

Who do you know is making good in Chicago and the world? This might be a quiet little series of connecting conversations or blossom as the next generation of GlobalChicago networking. Who do you think I should I know in Chicago?

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It’s the Conversation…

Shel Israel this morning, talking about business blogging at MeshForum:

Blogging’s not the revolution — the conversation is the revolution.

I’d say the same about Open Space Technology — and that’s why the two go so well together. Have a meeting that is many meetings at once. Blog all the notes and plans. Comment on the progress. Blog the milestones. Repeat until full resolution, of everything.

This morning is my first experience with trying to listen to conference presentations, following thoughts that pop up for me, and blogging highlights all at once. Think I’m getting a brain cramp!

Tip of the morning: Robert Scoble uses newsgator.com. I setup a free test account and in the first 10 minutes it looks way better than bloglines. Think I’m sold.

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Chicago Conservation Corps

I went to the orientation meeting for the new Chicago Conservation Corps volunteer leadership program last night. Very exciting stuff from a big city government — actively inviting individuals and offering direct and open support for community projects.

Applications for the 4-week program are due May 15th, and attendance at the orientation — to understand the commitment — is required:

You care. Do something. We’ll help.
Rain gardens. Recycling. Alternative transportation. Energy efficient homes. Get trained with the Chicago Conservation Corps and develop an environmental improvement project for your community. To learn more, attend an orientation May 6, 9, 11 or 13 at locations throughout the city. Visit the website or call (312) 743-9283 to register.

When the city initiated the green rooftop at City Hall five years ago, there was only one contractor in the country who could do the required work. Now there are twenty in the City and more than 69 acres of green roof. Looking forward to learning and contributing to the next waves of work on transportation, water, energy, food and other essential community issues here. Join us?

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Thanks for all the Fish

Woohoo! Today is the first day of my 16th year of self-employment.

Once upon a time, I was sitting having a beer with an old friend in New York, when he asked me “Do you remember what you said when you first quit your job?” I did remember, and I told him, that my goal was to see if I could stay out for a year and have some adventures. “That was three years ago!” he pushed back, smiling. And indeed it had been. At the time it was rather shocking to me. Now that three-year mark is twelve years old and the adventures are going just fine.

A moment of thanks rippling out to all the friends, literally all around the world, who’ve been a part of this long strange fishing trip, if I may, on this momentous occasion, be allowed to to mix my literary references!

And happy birthday (tomorrow) to, Kevin, my old friend in New York.

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