Author: Michael

The OSLIST conversation about preparing for Open Space Technology continues. Here’s one of my own contributions there…

One of my latest descriptions of Open Space Technology is this: it is fundamentally a decision and a commitment on the part of leaders and sponsors and facilitators to movement. Seen from this place we can always ask ourselves whether the work we do in the prep time is making movement more or less easy, more or less possible.

Some see a preparatory focus on the “givens” as getting in the way of movement. Others note that in corporate groups it helps for folks to hear that this or that is open for movement, that movement is allowed and expected. Some simply say, “Let’s get moving together now” and organize an “open” planning session with leaders and sponsors. Others prefer to let the movement go as it will/can and deal with givens as limits that tend to pop up in the discussion of the Theme or Question. Sometimes the discussion about what is happening now, current conditions, usually experienced as limits, can help surface the Bigger or Deeper Question that is not being addressed directly. All in all, I’m hearing that movement, and the space to move in, is the common center. Not particularly surprising, I think.

In terms of moving through meeting preparation then, I find that many “givens” or what I sometimes think about as “forms of focus” are necessarily embodied in the people who will come. The invite list. If you want discussion and ideas, invite talkers. If you want decisions, invite the decisionmakers. If you want action, invite those known for doing. If you want it fast, invite the bottlenecks. etc. I think in many cases if I fish around the edges of who should be there, who could be allowed to be there, then most everything else gets handled in that question. As we expand or simply clarify the invite list, we take care of naming and testing lots of “givens,” too. And in the end, those invited are certainly the ones who decide what this event will be. So they really do embody the whole of it…

In this way, you see, OpenSpaceTech serves to focus what and who the organization already is… and literally invites movement on the most important issues and questions. What more could we ask for?

The NYTimes reporting today that 20 million people visit Wal-Mart each and every day. If it was a separate country, it would be China’s 8th largest trading partner. Some say their low-cost business model has cut American inflation by 1 percent, saving American consumers millions. They are the pinnacle of technological control married to massive markets. Every penny counted and accounted for. The temperature of every one of their 3,500 stores controlled from headquarters in Arkansas. Also despised as promoters of over-consumption, falling wages, and benefits packages that many employees can’t afford.

The Times article suggests that Wal-Mart is the defining corporation of this era, following in the footsteps of the Pennsylvania Railroad, General Motors and Microsoft. They point out that Wal-Mart’s success derives from it’s ruthless attention to consumption and the consumer. The company gives consumers what they want at the lowest price possible, which leads the Times author to conclude that the efforts to oppose Wal-Mart can never succeed if they continue to be predicated on having ordinary Americans see themselves as something other than consumers.

The key question must then become: Consumers of what? Wal-Mart has built a huge operation that is stunningly effective in serving consumer demands. They don’t do education, they just respond with ruthless efficiency. If consumers demanded healthier, more sustainable products, this machine could be driving down the costs and ramping up the availability of those products. They will never lead demand, but they must respond to it. Even in the face of this apparent economic might, America is still an economic democracy. And as long as we vote for junk, degradation and bad health, our Constitution says we are entitled to as much of it as we can fit in our supersized carts.

If we want to change the world, then we must change our minds — at the check out stand. We need to be more creative, more healthy and more awake and alive in our pursuit of happiness. And once we manage that, as people, I would think that an operation like Wal-Mart could become a priceless national treasure.

…and I finally had time to call Rowan Hamilton, a teacher and practitioner of naturopathic medicine in Vancouver, BC. Here are some of the things we touched on in what turned out to be a remarkable conversation…

• A student of his is now in Duluth Minnesota and is working with large, corporate-type businesses to set up naturopathic clinics inside of the companies. This sounded to me like homeopathic organization, as it brings in a tiny bit of wellness and well-being information into the org and seems to have the potential to impact healthcare costs, employee health and well-being, and also the well-being of the business as a bigger body entity itself. In homeopathy, the more diluted the tincture, the more powerful the effect.
• In talking about Open Space Technology, I mentioned some of my ideas about death and release and we came to understand OpenSpaceTech as a way to invite the whole group or organization up into the cockpit of this ‘reality’ and look out together into the future. We noticed that Open Space lets us gaze out from the leading tip of the organization into the vast expanse of the future we’re flying into, and let’s us do it with others rather than in isolation from our seats and side windows, even though ‘otherness’ and separation don’t actually exist in that Space we’re looking into. That future is totally unscripted, until we impose our lines and stories on it. In that way, we can choose over and over again, to make less and less of these divisions between ourselves and others.
• We talked about his having given everything away to friends and family and left his home in England with a suitcase and a bicycle. He shared the story of another guy he’d met while hiking in the Grand Canyon. The guy had noticed his unhappiness with his wife and kids, his own body and his hometown of Bozeman Montana… and left. He packed a bag and hiked to the Canyon in Arizona where he found a job running supplies by muletrain in and out of remote villages. The Law of Two Feet writ large, i.e. if at any time you find that you’re not learning or contributing, you have the right and the responsibility to go where you need to in order to increase, maximize even, your own learning and contribution.
• He shared the story of a colleague who now lives on a self-imposed annual budget of $3,500 USD. He makes more than this, but gives the extra away. One of the things he does is teach some courses, one of which is a three-month residential in the backcountry of western Canada. He takes 30 students, for 3 months, to live in the woods… grow and find their food, live outside, the works. And after three months they leave the place without any footprints at all. Now that’s living lightly.
• Along the way we also noticed that it’s possible to change the shape of who we think we are in a direction away from physical things, clothes, body fat, houses, gear, policies, procedures, departments, equipment, and toys and carry more of ourselves as energy potential… and even shift further still to a space of awareness and noticing. Might think of this as the body equivalent of what is often talked about as a continuum of doing and being. As we get ‘lighter’ in rigid, heavy, physical ways, we have more energy available for applying in the moments where it’s really needed. And as we relax that energy store, as well, we can get more and more clearly aware of when and where it really is necessary to act. Linking back to the homeopathy story, as we relax from doing into being, from physical stuff, to raw energy, to awarness, we dilute our ‘selves’ and can have greater and greater effect in the world.
• Finally, we marvelled a bit at the territory we’d covered in this, our first conversation, and noticed that more and more of us are finding more and more of us who understand the shifts and opporutunities arising in communities, economies and across national borders these days. Even as the US seems to be already deeply engaged in WWIII, it also seems to be getting easier and easier to organize genuinely positive changes in the direction of generalized well-being on the planet. Interesting that these things seem to be happening in tandem.

Bonus Point: After I finished with Rowan, I went off (on my bicycle) to the Green Drinks sustainability gathering where Terra Brockman of the LandConnection and other panelists were talking about organic food for city folk.

• Terra had brought wild leeks, called ‘ramps’, to sell for $10/pound. Now these things grow wild in the woodland areas around her central Illinois home and a local farmer had harvested 3500 pounds from just one tenth of an acre. Do the math on that one, for one natural springtime’s yield. The moral of the story: there are more ways to make money on the land that plowing everything under for seas of corn and soybeans! We can be lighter on the land, too!

And as I rode home through a quiet downtown just after 10pm, a bank sign read 67 degrees. All Good Springing.

John Bishop, who works with HeartMath here in Chicago, sent this in response to my email invitation for The Practice of Peace workshop in June…

Journey to Peace, a feature documentary, explores the role of the individual in creating peace in times of unrest: within ourselves, our homes, workplaces, communities, countries, and the world. Nobel Peace Laureates who consciously chose to embrace peace in the face of devastating violence reveal their private stories and insights about initiating peaceful responses in themselves and the people around them.

While filming the award-winning documentary, Shadow Over Tibet: Stories in Exile, Journey to Peace, producers Valerie Mrak and Martha Howard received an unexpected answer from His Holiness the Dalai Lama. When asked what he meant by wishing Tibet be designated a “zone of peace,” instead of giving a bureaucratic or structured answer, he said that what he sought was not only external manifestations of peace towards animals, people, the environment; foremost, he knew that people would need to create a zone of peace in their hearts.

That struck a chord with the producers, and after returning to the US, they began asking themselves what a “zone of peace” meant to them as individuals and to society in general. They also observed what seemed to be escalating incidences challenging the idea of peaceful resolution to conflict—school violence, road rage, workplace pressure, fractured home life, and the continual reflection in the media of our worst tendencies.

The website is simple and beautiful, well worth a brief trip. It offers some links and resources for discussion groups, too.

Please join us for The Practice of Peace… an intimate and advanced Professional Development program on June 7-9, 2004 in Chicago (Oak Park, IL) with Harrison Owen and Michael Herman.

The old is falling apart, a new world’s emerging. Though nobody knows the moment. Seems everything’s in motion, but where are we going? Clearly we could use some Space. And Now. Open Space… to gather and talk, to work and learn, to solve and resolve our most important questions and issues related to:

• Promoting excellence and learning
• Engaging people in transformative shifts
• Generating new revenues and assuring profit
• Enhancing innovation and developing new products
• Building a collaborative workplace or network
• Focusing on assets and opportunities over problems
• Inspiring and inviting people to do best work
• Opening communication and connecting movements
• Strengthening leadership and effectiveness
• Healthy growth in organizations and communities
• Getting things done — in spite of everything!

If you work with people, manage projects, convene meetings, lead changes, organize conferences, or teach essential skills… there is something in this for you. Please join us! And please do share it with colleagues who would want to know that this is happening. Full Invitation

Christy Lee-Engle, who runs a bit of the Naturopathic Medicine program at Bastyr University, recently emailed about getting ready for an Open Space Technology event there…

I am working with some of my co-workers to invite all the staff, students and faculty to an open space (kind of–we only have 3 hours) conversation to talk about “what really matters” to us as members of the Bastyr community, in a couple of weeks. We made lots of invitations today–colored paper cut into moon and butterfly and turtle shapes, glitter, and snippets of quotes and questions–that we will put in mailboxes and on people’s chairs and in the cookie drawers in the bookstore, etc. I thought of you, and your description of open space as invitation practice. Good inspiration! Thank you again for that.

I love the invites in the cookies strategy. Invitation and OpenSpace at its best… is FUN!

I just got off the phone with Jon Aguilar, one of the lead organizers of a symposium called The Unseen Costs of War, about how we could use Open Space Technology to extend, expand and accelerate the important work he and his group have undertaken. Then I read this comment from Ashley…

when tova explained this to me in person, i barely heard her words…it was her body that really spoke to me (i can still see the shop window she was standing in front of). she stood there, open and receptive as she asked the sponsor what they wished for. then, she had her two hands together, palms facing up… and i could see that which the sponsor wishes for hovering, like a ball, in the space above her hands. she gently slipped up under their wish, supporting and helping to facilitate its actualization. that story expanded my practice exponentially… and always lives in my heart.

…and I noticed that this is indeed the shape of opening space. This shape of hands and wishes is just how my conversation with Jon finished. Noticing, too, that hands are literally extrusions of heart tissue as our bodies develop in utero. In this way, opening space is opening hearts.

Continuing on this question of how to handle expectations, boundaries, and “givens” in the preparation for Opening Space… Fr. Brian Bainbridge suggested that “over-concentration on the ‘Givens’ as they are called, simply disallows
the surprise and openness of what we embark on once space is opened.”

In the past, I’ve tried to name and specifically invite these things we’re calling “the givens,” but that only seemed to make more of them. Over-concentration, as Fr. Brian calls it. More often than not I seem to be bombarded with the givens, the limits and boundaries — as if there were nothing else of import or value to describe the organization or the situation. Sometimes they’ve been stacked up as proof that OpenSpaceTech could never work. Other times, laid out as a list of the concessions that had been required in order to get permission for a “trial version.”

Nowadays, I certainly am still listening for them when I talk with clients. But rather than name and focus on them, I try to push these conditions around in such a way that some space begins to open between them. As we talk, I keep looking around for what more and more I am sensing as the “clean spots” in the midst of the confusion and layers of the story. I keep fishing and feeling for those clean spots, little bits of genuine clarity, and then I’m sort of sewing and resewing them together until we get enough space to dance. How’s that for mixing my metaphors?

But sometimes that’s how it is with these clean spots. They don’t always look like they’re gonna fit together. But then they do fit — and we have our Opening. So that’s what we invite people into, that Open Space that is clean and clear and accessible and useful for everyone involved. And that’s what we animate and grow in the event itself.

Last night Phil Cubeta and I spent a couple of hours fishing and fitting clean spots. This after a couple of weeks churning out draft invitations. What we finally arrived at was new level of clarity for this conference: Opening Space for Giving to Flourish. And the more we talked about it, the more the space we found opening. The story got easier to tell, more limber, more durable — more inviting and invitable. As a result, the whole conference feels more possible and powerful. That’s when you know you’re onto something. So this morning I did some more searching, for extra meeting space options, just in case this thing wants to get LARGE.

As our OSLIST conversation continued, Tova Averbuch in Holon, Israel (near Tel Aviv and the Sea), offered a beautiful spin on the Elwin Guild bit just posted. Tova says…

We ask every one of the sponsors what are they wishing for

The general assumption about OpenSpaceTech meetings is usually that they are totally unstructured. Well, that may be true in the very beginning, but through the preparation and meeting opening processes, a detailed agenda is developed by many many people, including and beginning with the sponsors. This agenda is not so much created as it is surfaced from the minds and hearts of those involved. That is why the agenda always fits the people and the situation so precisely.

In a discussion today on the OSLIST about preparations, expectations, “givens,” and boundaries, Elwin Guild, who does a lot of work internationally in developing countries and conflict situations, offered a beautiful bit on preparation and opening space:

I do find something very useful in dealing with the sponsor

My friend AshleyCooper sent this today, from an interview at IntegralNaked…

Many artists are sitting right on the edge of emptiness… right where the universe is taking birth.

And a whole lot of the rest of us, too! …sitting right here on the edge of the open space between a past that’s truly done and gone, and a world of new stuff that’s not quite come to light.

One of those new things, The Open Space Giving Conference, is just being sketched out now at GiftHub.org, by folks in Dallas, Vancouver, Chicago, Boston, SanFran, and elsewhere. We’re going to get a bunch of “artists” together and see what kind of big bang we can make together.

Chris Corrigan posted this after three days in Open Space with Aboriginal youth leaders in British Columbia…

…they seem to me to be taking on the predominant culture in many ways, crafting a series of powerful decolonization tools and methodologies as they go. The most important of these maybe the rejection of the corporate world’s modus operandi of stripping people clean of their culture and replacing their inherent self-worth with a need to consume. Instead of consuming endlessly to mount their identity these youth are exploring the opposite of consumption: giving. They are evaluating what they have to offer and trying to find practical ways to give that to the world.

I have been writing for a long time that the process of decolonization is ultimately not and external battle with systems and behaviours, but rather an internal fight to reclaim authentic intention and culture.

Of course, it is not just native people whose identities and specialness are being stripped away (consumed?) by the mainstream monoculture of big money and media.

My friend Patricia Deer sent this today. Last year she organized a shipment of these sun ovens to Angola. This year the goal is bigger.

NEEDED: Used Video and Digital Camera Equipment for Angolan Oven Project

These cameras will be used to document the development of a sun oven project in Quito, Angola (one of the main cites in central Angola and one of the cities that was under a nine month siege during the decades long civil war.)

Recently the city asked for an industrial size sun oven to develop a bakery project for child soldiers and other displaced people. People in Evanston and Chicago raised $20,000 to buy the large oven and 60 small ovens for individual families. This was done by SHARE a small non-profit started by an Angolan student here.

Sun ovens can play a crucial role in developing countries. Without them, people are foraging for wood and destroying the forests in order to be able to cook. (Haiti, for example, has no trees left to burn.) When women cook over a wood burning fire they have their babies tied to their backs, and by some estimates the smoke inhaled is the equivalent to smoking 3 packs of cigarettes a day.

The long-term goal of the project will be to raise $50,000 to build a manufacturing plant to produce sun ovens for all of south Africa.

CAN YOU HELP? For information or to buy a sun oven for a family call Guerra Freitas at SHARECircle Network. The great thing about this kind of giving is that it goes almost directly to real people and new capacity.

jeff aitken posted a beautiful invitation today…

…set aside the dynamics of the US presidential election. those who can vote can make a choice anytime, including election day.

in our opinion this is deeper, more important. we have the opportunity to say: this is how i imagine america. and we can learn how others imagine america too.

we purposefully offer the term america. it is somewhat provocative. we intend to invite many different perspectives. there are north americans, south americans, central americans. there are those who say america is the US; those for whom america conjures a kind of dream, an aspiration; those for whom america is an imported term, laid on top of a place with other, older names. there are many other perspectives. we would like to learn whether the term is more provocative than useful. and also, whether it’s more impactful to imagine one’s city or region than to imagine america.

we honor bliss and michael and their colleagues with imagine chicago, and the other imagine projects around the world. we also honor three recent evening events called imagine america, which highlighted talks by visionaries from the US.

we will meet in open space. how do you imagine america? what are the issues and opportunities for america’s future? some gatherings will begin in san francisco in may. proceedings will be posted online. you are invited to come, or start your own gatherings. more details to come.

if you are in range of chicago and want to be part of gathering here, see this page!

As Bloomberg is reporting today that some economists have pencilled out how all can run quite smoothly over the next year or two. Jobs come back, but slowly. Inflation stays mild. Interest rates rise slowly and not until we get into 2005. Markets keep rising. Almost too good to be true. Holding this up next to doom and gloom from some other corners, it makes me wonder if the system we have evolved over the last century or so really is a giant Ponzi (pyramid) scheme like some claim or if the global economy isn’t more like an arms race sort of scenario, ultimately stabilized by the prospect of mutually assured destruction.

Loosely related to this, I’m heartened by DonIannone‘s reference to this from Business Week. The Bureau of Labor Statistics is projecting 8 million more jobs than workers by 2010. Seems like the ramp-up to that ought to be starting pretty soon then. And it sounds like it’s going to be easier to find interesting things to do. Flexible schedules, too, I imagine. Creative and productive retirements. However, the primary driver for the rosy scene reported by Bloomberg was slack in the labor supply. Go figure.

More and more, I am coming to believe that everybody is right. The whole thing is going to crash and burn while everything works out just fine. The stories we cling to about what retirement, for instance, “should be” and how healthcare, education and other kinds of work “should be” organized are likely to take a pretty good hit. This is, in part, why I see Open Space Technology as a sort of hospice care for “the way things have always been done around here.” But I also see it as midwifery. Life goes on.

Everything’s just gonna have to be different AND the vast majority of all of us will just keep on keepin’ on, living life as happily as we know how, as long as we’re lucky enough to be here. My bet today is that Life is thicker than the stories and plans and procedures we wrap it up in. My experience is that OpenSpaceTech helps our stories and connections keep up with inevitable flow of Life.

What’s more, I do think that all the talk that [somebody] should be creating more jobs and/or somehow creating more workers is mostly missing the mark. The question is “what is each of us — you and me — doing to maximize our own learning and contributing to value in our organizations and communities?” If anything is really going to crash and burn, it’s the story that somebody or something out there is going to make everything all right.

Everybody’s got gifts, talents, skills, passions, experiences, and connections. Everybody. And if there really is a labor shortage coming, then we’re gonna need everybody to be using all they’ve got! Anybody who uses more and more of themselves each week and year is bound to be noticed, appreciated and looked after, over time, by friends, co-workers, and neighbors. In the end it seems that stocks, Social Security and even “risk-free” US Treasuries will turn out to be much riskier investments than neighbors and neighborhoods. Is it time to re-balance the portfolio?

island spring seeps light
lightly on the mossy ground
dreams of flowering

thanks to penny scott who posted this from bowen island, in response to yesterday’s haiku.

the finest of threads
spun from the chaos with care,
the pinstripes of life.

Yesterday, I noticed by happy accident that all of this-life might just be a momentary compression of All Space, all-that-is, or what physicists have called the Zero Point Field, as written up by Lynn McTaggart in a book called The Field. I posted a bit about this in the afternoon, but brain followed the thread into the evening, chasing the implications, which seem to go like this…

If all of life really is pulsing between what we experience as this life body and what we sense as All Space, then it seems most important to cultivate in ourselves an easy pulsing between the certainties of body, business and environment and the uncertainties of, Divine if you like, mystery and power of All Space, inner, outer and otherwise.

With practice it seems, we learn to come and go more as we choose… not only this body to the next, like enlightened masters are supposed to do, but this day to the next, this job to the next, this conversation to the next, moving freely and cleanly and clearly through one ‘thing’ to enter the next ‘thing’ fresh and whole and ready …rather than being swept along unconsciously in the mainstream flow, bumping and clinging to the rocks. (Which reminds me of the opening parable in Richard Bach’s Illusions, btw.)

Coming back to workplace, then… Open Space Technology can be seen as the skillful practice of this pulsing between the technical knowns and uncountable unknowns in organization. OpenSpace allows us to move more easily into the essentially explosive, spontaneous, relational questions in MarketSpace, still and simultaneously grounding what happens back to the everyday work, the accountability, the results required in what we call the ‘real’ world.

In this way, Open Space is hospice AND midwifery for “the way things have always been done around here.” A space that holds-without-separating this organization and the whole of the world marketplace, so they can move more easily together. Business alignment and movement arising out of personal alignment and connection. How else could it be?

I just got off the phone with a good friend who’s in the process of re-entering the world. Her Mom died this month and my friend is only a few days beyond the seven-day Jewish practice of sitting shiva.

Along the way in our conversation, she says something to the effect that she is clearly becoming a different person through this process of her mother’s release. She feels her identity shifting. She is living and being differently.

As Life turns out, my parents’ bodies are still here and kicking. So I claim no expertise, but I suggested that my friend’s use of the word ‘release’ seems helpful and noticed that it seems literally true. Death as release of body and bodily doings. Naturally then, the bodies around us pick-up little bits of the functioning work that we’ve released. As a body, my friend is sifting through and taking on so many of the things her Mom’s body has just let go.

I said something of this to her, as I looked out from my eleventh-floor view of the sunny near north side of Chicago, neighborhood in springtime, school kids yelling on the playground, coats on the ground, jet overhead writing white on blue — and it was immediately clear that life in this physical world really is but a momentary constriction, contraction, compression of the larger Life space… out of which we have been squeezed and into which we will dissolve again. And in between All Space, there is our work, which we take on as it is released to us and, in turn, we release into the hands and bodies of others.

Lifetime as bardo. Workplace too, as daily bardo. All Space as one great hourglass and this life as middle moment. The pulse point between bottom and top. But how can this be? And how is it that Life gets bottom-to-topped so it can run back the other way?

Perhaps that question too comes still from too small a view… perhaps the glass never turns. It only goes on and on and on… one life followed by All Life followed by one more life… world without end… the pulse of One Heart and All Space.

None of which does much to ease the pain of our current constriction, as we are stretched again open to the life just released to our care.

The business case for storytelling, from elearningpost via BrewedFreshDaily:

Doc Searls has written an excellent piece on why weblogs will succeed where traditional knowledge management has failed. His explanation ties in with what we observed couple of years ago: weblogs are personal stories that embody tacit knowledge. Doc puts it nicely: “they are about sharing and growing what we know and what we can tell.”

A similar case would suggest that the active and conscious practice of OpenSpaceTech, invitation, and spontaneous organization will succeed when command, control and planned organization lose traction. Doc Searls also uses a four-quadrant map that lines up perfectly (if you spin it 90degrees) with the frame in InvitingOrganizationEmerges.

Some other good bits on OrganizationAsNarrative (storytelling) are posted in the wiki.