Designing Peace
This newest NewDimensions interview should be a good one. It will be available for free listening until August 11th or so. In his 20
Save the Dates – Midwest Open Space – November 17th & 18th, 2003
Enhancing the Wholeness of Organizations:
How Open Space Keeps Everyone Working Together
…in Spite of Everything!!!
Learn about OpenSpaceTech through the direct experience of it. Having noticed that Wholeness is essential for the Living function of all organizations, from families to communities to the Fortune 500, we invite you to consider how it is that we preserve and enhance the essential, functional Wholeness and Life of organizations, even as so many distractions, disruptions and dysfunctions compete for our attention.
This forum is an Exploration of the many things that are still/already really working, an Opportunity to work with like-minded friends and colleagues to grow more successes, and an Open Space for learning and connecting with other corporate, union and community leaders. More about Enhancing Wholeness
Asset-Based Community Development
My Notes from the ABCD training workshop, are posted in the GlobalChicagoNotebook.
According to ABCD gurus John McKnight and Henry Moore, Community Building differs subtly from how we usually organize ourselves for production, consumption, service and problem-solving. It focuses on Gifts, Dreams, Skills, Passions of Individuals and the Relationships and Associations that we form to share and develop these essential human attributes.
Like OpenSpaceTech, it invites Caring, Responsibility, and Direct, Effective Action. The practice is one of Identifying Assets and the Connecting them in ways that generate more and more Learning and Contribution.
So, what is your most significant gift? …not a learned skill, but a real gift that you were born with. And how have you been using and sharing it lately?
BlogsAndWiki Classroom
Last week I was thinking about teaching English using Wiki and Blogs. Yesterday, AbbeNormal led me to MC Morgan’s experimental BlogsAndWiki course at Bemidji State University in Minnesota. A veritable treasure trove of technical and teaching resources. Pack a lunch when you go, you’ll want to stay a while.
While I was there, Renee Loud’s posting in the course’s BlogsAndWiki DayBook, about her experience at the Northwoods Writers Conference, reminds me how much environment matters… as our inner wordsmith drones on and on, using whatever material is at hand… all the more reason to watch where we step when we go out walking…
This morning, I’m walking over to the Green City Market (fresh, whole, sustainable, organic… yum!) in Lincoln Park… to get some food that’s Alive.
Dark Matter 1 – Open Space 0
Well, apparently there was something more to DarkMatter than I first noticed! Apparently, it’s a bit more powerful than OpenSpace or Technology.
I posted last Friday’s DarkMatter entry to the OSLIST worldwide OpenSpaceTech email listserve, a dependable sort of list of 350 participants now in its 8th or 9th year, and then the whole list totally disappeared. While some messages have been posted and archived since the Dark posting, no messages have been able to get out for distribution. DarkMatter seems to have taken over. My post was the very last post to be distributed, and now there is nothing but
Dark Matter Technology
BBC reporting… Astronomers have made a ‘mass map’ of one of the most massive structures in the Universe, showing how much more there is to it than glowing stars and gas. The object is a distant cluster of galaxies that contains ‘dark matter,’ the unknown component that comprises most of the mass of the Universe. The map shows it is distributed in much the same way as are the visible stars.
Hubble photos show dark matter on the left
in blue and just stars on the right, undistorted.
Dark matter makes up about 80-85% of the matter in the Universe. Many types of objects are suspected ranging from dead stars to hoards of sub-atomic particles.
Makes me wonder if OpenSpaceTech wouldn’t be more aptly named “DarkMatterTech” since it seems to be where we explore and cut through the things that blur and distort clarity and movement in organization.
HOW Do I Want?
Following on from yesterday’s posting, I notice that as precarious as “I want…” can feel, “thank you” is always rock solid. No risk, no gap, no weakness, no attack. So maybe “thank you” is where new life begins. Life comes from life, what’s next comes from the best of what already is. Even and especially when it seems we have none of what we want, we must find what is working and invite it to grow.
Today I am thankful for calls from strangers and the opportunity to update our stories, as we retell the past and fish around for what’s next. For now.
What do I WANT?
Some conversations and spaces I’m in lately seem rooted in “no” and “don’t.” I notice that each new thing we say we don’t want closes us in a little bit. I see that if there is no wanting mixed in, if there is not also some “yes” and “let’s try” and “i would like…” and “please do…,” then we make ourselves smaller and smaller, sometimes more focused and powerful, but often sadly, painfully, maddeningly compressed and contracted, trying to not do things and not have the things we do not want.
This reminds me anew of the importance of wanting, of yessing, of moving out in the directions of those things that make us bigger, more whole, more alive. Flourishing. I notice that it feels dangerous, exposed, to say what is most wanted… Surely it’s impossible to have what we want. To ask seems to expose a weakness. But somehow, “I want…” seems lately to be opening and easing these conversations I’m in. Seems cleaner. Seems the greater danger, really, is that if I ask I may indeed receive — and that would change everything.
Am thinking just now that “I want…” must be about the most honest thing we can ever say, most powerful, most inviting, even if most precarious. Ah, yes, and then there is the joy of pulsation, yes and no. Oh my.
See Marshall Rosenberg’s Non-Violent Communication for more on noticing and naming wants and needs.
Many Hands
This past Saturday, I had the good fortune to be present at a real, live barnraising at Angelic Organics and the CSA Learning Center. About a dozen people had worked all week making a barn (literally) by hand — hand drilling, hand chiselling, hand cutting — from 134 large timbers, fashioning tenons and mortises (tabs and slots), and then assembling four massive walls. On Saturday, another 50 or so of us showed up to lift those walls into place and add the various connecting pieces and floors.
The most remarkable part of the whole experience was being part of 50-60 people, all holding what we could of the massive weight of each of those big-timber walls. We could struggle or we could slack off a bit and rest, but somehow the walls just floated on our 100+ hands… and then slowly tipped skyward into place. We had a beautiful sunny day, some fantastic food, and a bunch of folks who came out just to watch. It was a gorgeous, glorious day. Beyond words, really.
They say that you can count on one hand the number of barns built each year in this high-craft, high-community way. I’d like to think that OpenSpaceTech is inviting a similar spirit and ease into other kinds of work. The connection between BarnRaising and OpenSpaceTech was strengthened for me when I was leaving: “Some great people here today, Tom. Sure would like to see what happens if they all got into a big circle,” I said to Learning Center Director Tom Spaulding. “Let’s do an Open Space!” he called back from the second floor, as he pounded the last floor boards into place and the moon came up full over the fields.
Inspiring Youth
ChrisCorrigan has been doing some really great work in OpenSpaceTech with young people in Vancouver, BC. Some powerful stuff posted in the TrainingPracticeWorkshopProceedings. The following comes from a youth-led working session on MakingBCaModelforN8VEmpowerment (N8V=Native). I found this bit particularly heartening…
Current people in leadership positions need to be ‘held up’ by us commoners. I want to make U a better leader in whatever way I can. We can no longer afford to act as though our elected chiefs and hereditary chiefs possess all the answers and hold a magic wand to make things better. Community development takes a community. I understand that we need a strategy do this and it may take many years to achieve. I can do it. I’m young. Just teach me and others how to do this. I don’t want to reinvent the wheel. Tell me your 20 year plan, and I’ll implement it. I’ll hold you up.
Would love to connect young leaders in Vancouver and Chicago — and Chicago youth and Chicago leadership — in some combination of OpenSpaceTech meetings and online working space!
Inspiration
Bliss Browne of ImagineChicago fame sent along the following last week…
This summer something wonderful is happening in Chicago: an exhibit on living women in Chicago who are social justice pioneers. Two dozen women have created an exhibit which showcases action and thought on behalf of social justice and the personal and spiritual connections that have animated it. The installations are wonderful. A magnificent 25 minute film accompanies the exhibits and features the honorees and the young women who interviewed them to gather stories for the exhibit.The exhibit and realted special programs are all free. They are being held at Archeworks, 625 N. Kingsbury (River North area, near Ontario) and is open Saturdays to Mondays 12-6 pm and Tuesdays 2-8 pm, with free special programs on Sunday afternoons at 3:30 pm and Tuesday evenings at 6 pm. There is also space for meetings/receptions of up to 100 people.
Opening Space in Oz
This just in from Brendan McKeague in Perth, Western Australia…
…the ongoing story of our local OS practice Group here in Perth, Western Australia, called Keeping the Space Open (KTSO) …began after Michael Herman’s visit in October last year, when he led the first OS facilitator training in Western Australia. One of the Action Plans emerging from the OS session in the training program was to create an ongoing practice group so that new trainees could have a safe space in which to confirm their skills and learn more about OS.More about OpenSpaceTech and TrainingAndPracticeWorkshop…[We just hosted our second follow-up event and] …once again, to our surprise, forty people registered and more showed up on the night – ended up with about 45. One of the trainees was ‘the coordinator’, another the sponsor’ and another ‘the facilitator’. Another great evening of conversation, camaraderie and conviviality….and the space remains open… two further OS facilitator co-learning workshops here this year and at least one further KTSO session.
hmmm…
after a few days with the keyboard out of reach i come back wondering… who would i be without a computer… not because i am on the verge of tossing it out… indeed, i spent an hour exploring the new apple store today… but because i find it helpful to imagine beyond the edges… and then i wonder what organization is becoming… and what might happen if i stopped responding to email in favor of going out and talking with everyone who emailed… and asking them what their organization, community and world are becoming… and how we might together nudge them in the direction of… one.
Kaboom!
fireworks tonight!
Expanding Strategy
Beyond strategic planning, and in most cases despite strategic planning, much of our most potent action is guided by invitation and story. Of course, when strategic planning expands to include these, it is powerful indeed, but that’s not yet the norm. Here is something that seems to likely to expand our species understanding of the power of invitation, story and human-scale (market)places…
Urban Tapestries is building an experimental location-based wireless platform to allow users to access and author location-specific content (text, audio, pictures and movies)… Urban Tapestries allows users to annotate their own virtual city, enabling a community
Ready, Set, Click!
more about 26 things…
Who’s The Boss?
I’ve quieted down my life quite a bit in the last years, reading fewer books, listening to less music, putting the TV in the closet, and generally cleaning up the clutter. So after a simple dinner last night, I took a walk through my Old Town neighborhood here and found myself at an old familiar place: Barbara’s Bookstore.
One Bowl
In the July issue of ConsciousChoice, Julia Mossbridge offers notes from her challenging but generally positive experience with Don Gerrard’s book, One Bowl: A Guide to Eating for Body and Spirit. Here are the basic rules for the practice, which she did for thirty days…
Sounds like a good, kind, alternative to or preparation for fasting… or this could be adapted for practice with other appetites… touching abundance and satisfaction of all kinds.
- choose a bowl that holds one to one-and-a-half cups of water and eat every meal out of that bowl
- eat only when you are hungry
- put exactly what you desire in your bowl
- stop eating when you feel full, and
- eat alone when possible
Some friends and I have been fishing around for the ways in which we support well-being in bodies, communities (bigger bodies), and organizations (business bodies)… recently remembering this about self-care and self-kindness…Your well-being touches others and expands the possibility of more ease. The more you rest down, the more benefit you offer. Which is also to say: your ease eases others.
…don’t actually have to DO anything. Though remembering others and letting your ease radiate out sure wouldn’t hurt…Thanks to Sarah Schubart for restating this bit from Julie Henderson (pictured, at ease).
Steve Jobs and Jeff Bezos meet “Ginger”
A wee bit of a longer excerpt from Code Name Ginger, the story behind Dean Kamen