Michael Herman's Blog (2003-2016)

Beyond Words

This just in from my friend Sabine who has just arrived from Berlin at the Bairo Ling Monastery in Kathmandu, Nepal. Liam, her son, is five years old and is there to see about becoming a monk. Sabine writes…

Liam is strolling around with the smaller monks and has made friends already. The monks speak Ladhaki, Liam is talking in German, both sides, so far I can say, not very impressed by the fact that these are regarded as different languages. They obviously have fun.

Add to this the following posted this week on the OSLIST…

Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at an Elingsh uinervtisy, it deosn’t mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht frist and lsat ltteer is at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae we do not raed ervey lteter by itslef but the wrod as a wlohe.

It’s all a mix of, well, um, whoa and wow and… hmmm… for one like myself, so… well, you know… with words.

More Attention

Thanks to George Nemeth for his comment on yesterday’s posting…

Michael – That’s a great case for what “The Most Valuable Asset” is. Reflecting on that, it think it’s safe to say that there isn’t one single MVA, but the intersection of people, knowledge, time, and attention. Thanks for spurring those thoughts!

As I roll around with this a bit, I find myself mapping these things back to the frame I laid out in InvitingOrganizationEmerges. That article connects Native Peoples’ wisdom, Fast Company Magazine, OpenSpaceTech and other stories on a set of nested frames translated from the work of Ken Wilber.

Seems to me that in our story (if not yet in our actions) we have moved from valuing People to Time to Knowledge. With luck, we might just refine our working story further to focus on Attention, the Level beyond Knowledge. With each Level, we drill deeper into who we are and what we need from each other, the work gets physically easier, but also more potent and harder to manage and control. Not one more valuable, because all of them always and already present… but each a little deeper and more challenging and powerful to work with.

Attention

GeorgeNemeth recently posted this blip from Computer World…

Knowledge management is not a playful buzzword but a dynamic initiative companies need to take more seriously if they want to harness their most valuable corporate asset: Knowledge.

Actually, I think none of these is the real bottom line. Knowledge is only valuable if people pay Attention to it. Time only important if we focus our Attention in it. And people only valuable if they give their clear, full Attention to their work. But how to invite that quality of Attention? I think we have to do that by giving our own Attention to those things that matter most in our work.

So Attention must be our most valuable asset, for each of us and each of our organizations. Until we look directly and work directly with Attention — how we invite it, focus it, move it and apply it — I think we’ll continually miss the mark, individually and organizationally. OpenSpaceTech, of course, works directly on and with organizational attention. It is invitation, focus, movement and action. It moves us closer and closer to the marks we want to hit.

So what are you giving Your Attention to this week? And how do we get Your Attention recognized as the primary tool of business and organization?

The Return

Back now from the mountains, where I reacquainted myself with my favorite quote from the Hurricane Island Outward Bound School’s Book of Readings.

When the going is tough and the pressure is on, when reserves of strength have been drained and the summit is still not in sight, then the quality to see in a person is not great physical strength or quickness of hand, but a resolute mind firmly set on its purpose, that refuses to let its body slacken or rest.

–Sir Edmund Hillary

Reached the summit in time to see an other-worldly orange moon rise over the next ridge, with Mars just off a bit to the right. The two of them together, both so full, made me think this must be what it would be like to be on Jupiter, with two moons rising. Chilly. Also a bit strange, we came up to this high, remote, ridge camp and found a young Belgian guy already camped there, solo. We said hello and asked him what time it was. He said hello and asked us if he could borrow a lighter or some matches. (yikes!)

Rains started after dinner the first night. Stayed really dry in the tent, but my partner’s gear failures forced us to abandon the 34-mile loop we’d planned. Instead, we chilled (literally and figuratively) through the next day, fogged in thick in the usual ridge-top blustery winds bombarding the tent and spitting rain and fog at us. Somewhere in that second day, I remembered that I could let the energy of each breath go all the way in to my toes, to keep them warm. On the third day, we headed down and out the way we came in, still raining, windy and cold.

Halfway out, we had something shy of one mile of steep climbing switchbacks to get to the main pass. As I started up, I remembered one of my Tibetan teachers who once carried his teacher over the mountains to escape the Chinese. I figured he should know something about climbing with a heavy load. As I reflected on his story, I let my mind mix with his, gliding easily up the trail. In this way, I was able to climb without ambition, and without stopping or tiring. My pack — and then by own physical body — became the load, and the teacher. I understood body as teacher, which reminded me of how cancer patients and others sometimes talk of their physically challenging conditions. I experienced directly what Julie Henderson has said: body not separate from mind, just moving so much more slowly.

Coming back one day early and leaving miles of planned route uncovered doesn’t feel particularly triumphant, but perhaps the triumph is just moving so much slower than the Return.

Life After Life

When I wake up later this morning, I will do something I haven’t done in seven years. I will stuff my gear into my pack and drive into the mountains, North Cascades to be exact. When I get there, I will leave the car and start walking. Some days later I hope to return to the car triumphantly. This will be the first time under my pack and in my tent in the backcountry in six years, since I stepped off a small cliff (in the frontcountry) in the middle of a very dark night.

An active backcountry hiker and former Outward Bound instructor, I had resigned myself to the fact that I just wouldn’t do this stuff anymore. So it feels good to have the gear and the pre-trip butterflies back in play. Am going out in the same t-shirt I wore to the hospital six years ago, picking up where I left off. I sure hope all the parts are working well enough to get up and down the moutains and stay out of the way of the grizzlies and cougars (grin). I’ve dusted off this poem to honor my return to the trail.

(after the fall)

I want to stand on the rock of the mountain top
embraced by the vastness of midnight.
I want to be patient enough to stand there forever
and restless enough to step off into
mid-air.

I want the strength to cling and wings to fly,
but can I just sit for now?
And wherever I am and whenever it comes,
I want to greet the next light with a grin
and nothing to regret.

But why am I so wanting? Am I not this already?
Even as I’m clinging in mid-air
and flying into rock?

Aligning Bigger Bodies

Continuing to play today with this notion of organizations and communities as (bigger) bodies: pelvis as base and seat of power, OpenSpaceTech community or strategic dialogues as heart, and mapping, planning and visualization as brain. Thinking about how the shape of government, community and development on Bowen Island can rest and move more easily as a whole body, rather than divided into council discussions, private he-said, she-said conversations, and a coterie of local experts and visionaries each nurturing individually brilliant visions for the future of the Island.

Thinking too about what Anne Ironside is telling me about the visionary work of Frithjof Bergmann needing to be grounded locally, her own work in developing the UBC Women’s Employment Center on the ground here in Vancouver needing vision, and both of those needing something in between wherein the brilliance and the action can mix. Anne tells me that she thinks my work in OpenSpaceTech, practice groups, community dialogue and organic organization can help make these connections. In body terms again, this makes OpenSpaceTech and community dialogues the Heart, resting into the bowl of Anne’s local programming and informed by the vision of Bergmann.

Sitting in group meditation Sunday morning with Lisa Barrett, Bowen Island mayor, my mind returns again and again the question she and I and others have been rolling around with for the last several weeks here: How does the formality of the municipal council, the passion and openness of community dialogue, and the vision of the mapping process here all fit together in a whole (healthy) Island community body? What would normally be a distraction from the meditation work becomes fodder for it, expands it, transcends it, includes it. Early in the session, I decide that it’s only through the pulsation between awareness of individual body and awareness of community body can this question be answered.

Here is what happened next…

New Work

As the sun warmed up another gloriously clear day here on Bowen Island, I had a chance to sit out on the balcony that looks south through the trees and across Howe Sound to Vancouver. When I wasn’t taking in the view, I was taking in the views of Frithjof Bergmann as expressed in a couple of articles passed along by Anne Ironside.

If I was home in Chicago, I’d probably have read more stuff online already and be writing a longer bit for the wiki. But that can come later. For now suffice it to say that he is suggesting (and has been for some time now) that “full-time” work is a rather recent, and unsustainable phenomenon, a veritable blip in human history. He suggests we are moving away from working 40+ hours per week and that this has huge social and spiritual implications, above and beyond the more obvious and not insignificant economic ones.

At one point in my reading this morn, he was wondering if now that we have developed agricultural, manufacturing and services sectors, is there not some whole new sector to be developed. I think there must be. And I think it must be a community sector, or maybe a markets sector. As manufacturing transcended and included agriculture, and services have done the same to manufacturing, I think communities and markets must and will transcend and include services.

Machines made farming more effective and efficient (leaving aside for the moment the health implications of factory farming). Information (services) made manufacturing more effective and efficient. In both cases, jobs were eliminated. Less work, more output. I see the same thing happening now to managerial and other info-based work, where community groups, user groups, affinity groups, email listserves — whole, new markets — are more effectively and efficiently distributing essential information, without a coordinating manager or executive.

In organizations, OpenSpaceTech and other developments are speeding up the working and production processes, including the managers but transcending traditional managerial control. Communities of people working in ongoing OpenSpace can work more effectively and efficiently than ever before, moving information in Markets. And that’s the underlying structure of OpenSpace: super effective and efficient local markets for the information needed to do the work of organizations.

Machines took over farming and made it faster. Information-based services work took over manufacturing and made it faster. Now, markets are making information move faster — and markets, like previous sector movements are poised to take over. Markets have lives of their own. This will certainly lead to New Work for all of us and some more direct investigation when I get back to Chicago.

Gathering Charge

Many conversations this week have revolved around Power. Municipal decision-making, funding issues, the business case for compassion, and preparations for leading a Zapchen day here on Bowen Island tomorrow.

This all has me sensing into Power, Movement, Base, Support. Noticing that pelvis isn’t the actual power, but rather holds a space for the power that radiates from an Open Heart. Pelvis is the seat of Power. So too with government and business executives, their offices are the seats of Power, not the Power itself. Leaders hold a space for that Power which is all of us working together.

Peter Frost, author of Toxic Emotions at Work, reminded me this week that it’s not just Heart, but also liver, kidneys, etc that are needed to pump and process the stuff that moves through us and keeps us going. The healing/cleaning, embracing/radiating and moving/working are not separate. Peter, ChrisCorrigan and I have started working on an invitation for ToxicHandlers to gather in OpenSpaceTech to see what we can create together, for ourselves, our organizations, and our many other worlds. Conference dates will be late May, 2004.

In the meantime, we’ll do the first Zapchen workshop here on Bowen tomorrow… introducing some simple practices that, as Julie Henderson says, help us feel as good as we can in spite of everything. One participant called this week to sign up: “…wanting to get some of those ZappyBits,” she says, quoting the only thing she could remember from our invitation. As the calls come in, and we laugh here about “ZappyBits,” the Zapchen story is gathering charge — power for the practice that will be all of us moving together tomorrow.

Open Spaces

Two kinds of Open Space to report today.

The first kind is the wide open outdoor space that we live in and in some cases grow food in. Chicago’s own Ken Dunn is featured in today’s NYTimes in a story about his urban agriculture in the shadow of the Cabrini Green housing project.

The second is at OpenSpaceWorldNET where I am helping to host the online version of the 11th annual Open Space on Open Space. I’m on Bowen Island, just west of Canada. It’s in Bramstrup, Sweden/Denmark. The onSITE participants are from at least 19 different countries and online participants from perhaps a few more. It’s a remarkable gathering and the leading edge of OpenSpaceTech worldwide community.

Purpose and Practice

Am in the middle of two months of being away from home, at work on several projects, immersed in local practice communities, and still wired to the world online, all at the same time. Purpose seems to clarify itself in such times. This morning I described my work as Inviting, Encouraging, Informing People and Organizations that Work.

Also noticing practices like OpenSpaceTech, ZapchenSomatics, NonViolent Communication, PatternLanguage, Toxin Handling (Managing w/ Compassion) and WritingOnline as core. If I can just keep extending and expanding my understanding and capacity to practice forms and languages and languages like these, it seems that everything else will work and flow for the best. The right sidebar has links to most of these.

Emptiness, Open Road and Open Space

Just back from a few days of teachings with Tibetan Dzogchen Master, Lama Wangdor Rimpoche. Dzogchen. Non-Doing. Non-Meditation. Emptiness. And thus, this mostly Non-Report. Now, can I find and surf some sort of functional, pulsating movement between the clarity that he pointed out and business of the day?

Driving back up through the spectacular mountains of California and Oregon, many connections to OpenSpaceTech bubbled up, reinforcing my understanding of OpenSpace as a simple, powerful and directly accessible way of being in organization and way of working with organizational mind.

Catching up with emails here on Bowen Island (Vancouver) today and looking forward to the Eleventh Annual Open Space on Open Space worldwide practitioners’ conference. It happens onsite in Sweden/Denmark and online at OpenSpaceWorld.NET.

Oh yes, and I forgot Idaho, so it’s only 49 states visited.

Embodying Community

Had an interesting conversation with Murray Journeay and Penny Scott on the ferry on the way out of town… a chance to work a bit more on this notion of wholeness in community, a chance to talk through this view of community as being and body.

Looking at our three dimensional process of community development there, we considered Municipal Government as power, finance, and pelvis. It is the underlying power structure that can move things forward and can support/hold a space for our Community Dialogues. Those conversations, which we just held in OpenSpaceTech, are where we invite contribution, caring, and connection in an inclusive, embracing sort of way. This is the heart of community, which needs the power and funding support of the Municipal Council and out of which bubbles up visions and stories and ideas. The most compelling of these bubbles feed the brain of the place, the Community Viz mapping and visualization process. It’s that process that looks around and ahead so that the community grows in smart ways.

If we notice that the Municipal movement is guided directly by what comes out of the Mapping brain, then we see that the energy of the community moves in a circular, up-and-down way very similar to energy moving through individual human bodies. The route to well-being can be the similar too, aligning, nesting, resting down, easing together, trusting the different and essential contributions of each, letting each one touch and inform the others.

Want to work more on how people, groups and processes do this. Also, how does this translate into organizational terms. This seems to offer the possibility of an organic, human approach to organization and community working that transcends and includes specific methods, tools and techniques. This springs directly from my work with Julie Henderson and Zapchen Somatics.

Road Trip

Just getting ready to jump on the ferry and drive down I-5 to San Francisco. Once we get to Oregon, I’ll have seen all 50 states. Doing the trip today the easy way… in the car. Steve Grosskopf has some buddies, though, who are doing it on foot. Chicago to LA. They’ve got a nice website at www.youguysarestupid.com. Sounds like great fun, but I think I’d want to walk LA to Chicago, the road home is always a bit shorter and a little more downhill.

Do-It-Yourself Fantasia

The other night a bunch of us went down to the sea to see the phosphorescence. ChrisCorrigan might be posting more on the science of it all. Something about plankton soaking up sunlight all day and then releasing it when agitated by our bodies squirming through their seawater. We agitated quite a bit the other night, making huge streams of fantasmic lighting with arms and legs and rocks and sticks underwater. Our every underwater move dissolved into waves of streaming firefly light and when we emerged, the tricklings left fields of sparkles on our arms and legs and bellies. Even the sand lit up when we scraped it. Bowen Island as Magic Kingdom.

holy open space!

I gave our friend Avner a haircut while the breakout sessions were going on yesterday. After the meeting it was Chris’ turn. Can you believe he hadn’t had a haircut in something more than ten YEARS???

Well, believe the years, but not this image. Photoshop is a wonderful thing!

Day Two, Bowen Island and Beyond

Just finished another opening here on Bowen. Participants all out now in conversation. This is the second of two days on “How Can We Make Snug Cove an Inviting Place to Live Work and Play?” It’s mostly a new group of people today, and still we seem to be going deeper. Amazing to watch meaning move through community.

What we are doing here is community dialogue. AND some high tech mapping and modelling. AND some municipal decision-making on key issues that have a tremendous impact on the feel and the future of a very special little cove, the cozy little entrance to this island home for about 3000 people. We are beginning to establish the dialogue/inviting and the mapping/visualization processes as long-term practices, to add caring embrace and clear vision to the usual financial/political power of ongoing municipal government. We think this active and conscious connecting of power, caring and vision is fairly unique in communities. We think it will have quite a positive effect here on Bowen Island.

We are also excited to have friends and colleagues from Jerusalem here taking notes, so that what we are doing might add something to positive there as well. There is also some talk of our working there together next year. The key, as our visiting friend Avner Haramati points out, is to do our little works and not think any of it is too important. Little by little, peace and community do and will arrive.

Opening on Bowen Island

Technically, I am (at this very moment) in the middle of facilitating a community gathering here on Bowen Island, 18 minutes (by ferry) west of Vancouver BC Canada. Our gathering question and purpose is “How Can We Make Snug Cove an Inviting Place to Live, Work and Play?” We are using OpenSpaceTech and the participants are all off working now, so I’ve plenty of time make this entry. Today is the first day of a two day meeting. Here are the invitation for this event and the Institute that we’ve created to be one of the sponsors and official spaceholders for this work. As local organizer Chris Corrigan says, the Institute started as a joke, but then it got serious. And when it gets too serious, it gets to be a joke again. In the meantime, there are a bunch of people here talking about things that they care about, listening to each other’s ideas, and coming up with new ways to address ongoing community challenges together.

Looking into Happiness

The research of Paul Ekman, a colleague of Julie Henderson (one of my own most important teachers), has shown…

…that if a person merely arranges his face into a certain expression, he will actually feel the corresponding emotion. In other words, emotions work from the outside in as well as the inside out. The trick with happiness is that while everybody can smile, most people can’t move one crucial muscle around the eyes that must be moved to generate the physiology of happiness. With anger or disgust, though, everybody can make the right facial movements and turn on the physical sensations of those emotions. In a fake smile, only the zygomatic major muscle, which runs from the cheekbone to the corner of the lips, moves. In a real smile, the eyebrows and the skin between the upper eyelid and the eyebrow come down very slightly. The muscle involved is the orbicularis oculi, pars lateralis… people can learn to do this in under an hour. via nytimes

If we can develop new habits with this one muscle, then it must lead other easings and openings… heart, chest, pelvis, diaphrams, breathing, speaking. This state must also enable compassionate behavior, literally seeing and opening to other people, allowing them to be as real as to us as we are to ourselves. Perhaps this “happy” view makes more space for self and other? In any event, this all makes it easier to understand how a small shift in the human genome could quickly ripple out through the whole of our everyday reality. aaaaahhhhhhhh…

Recipes for Opening Space

I think we will make an OSLIST invitation to write our “recipes” for OpenSpaceTech. Sort of like the poetry contest we have there, you get as many ingredients and sequential steps as you can fit on a single recipe card, front and back. This would acknowledge that packaging and selling Open Space doesn’t work. When I try to “package” or “sell” OpenSpaceTech, it usually gets rejected. Structures seem to resist other structures. Still, there is the real need to have this recipe in our pockets for whipping up a batch wherever we are.

I imagine that if a bunch of us write up our own little recipes, it would be like recipes for chocolate chip cookies… mostly same, but with special little differences that make “my” mom’s recipe best. Some would have measured amounts, others simply a rough list of ingredients. Same for the prep steps. And some would have nuts. In the end, almost any kind of chocolate chip cookie is good. The secret ingredient, of course, is love.

The Monks at Bairoling Monastery

 
…near Kathmandu, Nepal.