Geoff Brown put up a formidable blog post capturing the whole process of our recent designing, planning and facilitating a conference in Melbourne. If you are interested in multiple ways of learning and understanding process as well as ways of telling a story, set aside some time and go dive into what he has written. As one who was there, all I can say is, bang on, mate!
PS there should be some sort of blog award for “most formidable blog post.” This one would win it.
I think it’s important to note that there is no research on “the art of hosting” that we know of but that there is much research out there in the world on what it is that we are working with and trying to evoke. One of the problems, as we are seeing in this thread, is that we don’t have the language or the conceptual frameworks to handle the extreme interiorty of this inquiry. In general, people looking for “research” on collective intelligence, emergence and social fields are looking for objective evidence that if we use participatory methods, things will be better than if we use top-down and mechanistic modes of working. This is such an elusive inquiry, let alone an easy project to undertake.
Of course there are models for looking at the world that balance interior and exterior modes of seeing the world, including Ken Wilber’s integral models and others. But I’d like to invite us to look beyond the Western scientific methodologies for some other clues.
In many traditional indigenous North American cultures, there are well established methodologies for understanding the world and understanding the social context for individual action and collective dynamics. Specifically, some of us in teh Art of Hosting CoP have been learning about Nuu-Chah-Nulth concepts of “tsawalk” which is a view of the world that is as foundational to Nuu-Chah-Nulth science as Cartesian world views are to western science. Tsawalk means “oneness” or “interdependence” and the methodology for understanding this world views is called “oosumich” which is a methodology in teh same way that empiricism is a methodology for Cartersian world views. Oosumich is both an individual and collective practice of accessing and understanding the collective and individual spiritual worlds (or the deep interior worlds, from which all forms derive their basic organizing pattern). It is a way to tap what is often called “source” and is therefore a very useful methodology for understanding design of structures and processes. Oosumich is also an evaluation method, being used both in real time and in reflective learning to gauge the various effects of things against the principle of Tsawalk. If something is understood to be contrary to Tsawalk, it can be said to have “failed” – if that is the right term, although I think there are more nuanced ways of looking at this.
Tsawalk has been written about in a very valuable book called “Tsawalk” a Nuu Chah-Nulth worldview” by Richard Atleo, who is a friend of our work. I sometimes use it in indigenous communities as an alternative to Theory U. Last december we structured an entire workshop on participatory process based on Tsawalk, and the participants were given Atleo’s book as a text. I wrote a little about it here.
At least one of our list members, Pawa Haiyupis, has been in this inquiry with me for several years. I think what it points to is thinking about the valid epistemologies that can help us understand what is happening in collective intelligence. It makes sense to me that we look at models that have been employed for centuries by societies who are collective in nature and whose concepts of the world are less about the split between subject and object and more about exploring the connection between things and their context, and especially the “unseen” dynamics that are at play in social and other fields.
Those of us working in the Art of Hosting community with indigenous communities have had this conversation and are in this inquiry with Navajo, Hawaiian, Anishnaabe, Skwuxw7mesh, Kwa’kwa’kawakw and other indigenous cultures. It doesn’t necessarily help us in putting western science to work, but I think it provides perspectives on ways of knowing that could open the inquiry in ways that are helpful from a foundational and conceptual point of view.
PS: Here is a report from a few years ago about using Tsawalk as the primary view to see systemic breakdowns in the child welfare system in BC.
I’m a sucker for principles, because principles help us to design and do what is needed and help us to avoid bringing pre-packaged ideas and one-size-fits-all solutions to every problem. And of course, I’m a sucker for my friend Meg Wheatley. Today, in our Art of Hosting workshop in central Illinois, Tenneson Woolf and Teresa Posakony brought some of Meg’s recent thinking on these principles to a group of 60 community developers working in education, child and family services, and restorative justice. We’re excited to be working nwith these principles in the work we’re doing with Berkana Institute. Here’s what I heard:
1. People support what they create. Where are you NOT co-creating? Even the most participatory process always have an edge of focused control or design. Sometimes that is wise, but more often than not we design, host and harvest without consciousness. Are we engaging with everyone who has a stake in this issue?
2. People act most responsibly when they care. Passion and responsibility is how work gets done. We know this from Open Space – as Peggy Holman is fond of saying, invite people to take responsibility for what they love. What is it you can’t NOT do? Sometime during this week I have heard someone describe an exercise where you strip away everything you are doing and you discover what it is you would ALWAYS do under any circumstances. Are we working on the issues that people really care about?
3. Conversation is the way that humans have always thought together. In conversation we discover shared meaning. It is the primal human organizing tool. Even in the corridors of power, very little real action happens in debate, but rather in the side rooms, the hallways, the lunches, the times away from the ritual spaces of authority and in the the relaxed spaces of being human. In all of our design of meetings, engagement, planning or whatever, if you aren’t building conversation into the process, you will not benefit from the collective power and wisdom of humans thinking together. These are not “soft” processes. This is how wars get started and how wars end. It’s how money is made, lives started, freedom realized. It is the core human organizing competency.
4. To change the conversation, change who is in the conversation. It is a really hard to see our own blind spots. Even with a good intention to shift the conversation, without bringing in new perspectives, new lived experiences and new voices, our shift can become abstract. If you are talking ABOUT youth with youth in the process, you are in the wrong conversation. If you are talking about ending a war and you can’t contemplate sitting down with the enemy, you will not end the war, no matter how much your policy has shifted. Once you shift the composition of the group, you can shift the status and power as well. What if your became the mentors to adults? What if clients directed our services?
5. Expect leadership to come from anywhere. If you expect leadership to come from the same places that it has always come from, you will likely get the same results you have always been getting. That is fine to stabilize what is working, but in communities, leadership can come from anywhere. Who is surprising you with their leadership?
6. Focus on what’s working, ask what’s possible, not what’s wrong. Energy for change in communities comes from working with what is working. When we accelerate and amplify what is working, we can apply those things to the issues in community that drain life and energy. Not everything we have in immediately useful for every issue in a community, but hardly anything truly has to be invented. Instead, find people who are doing things that are close to what you want to do and work with them and others to refine it and bring it to places that are needed. Who is already changing the way services are provided? Which youth organize naturally in community and how can we invite them to organize what is needed? What gives us energy in our work?
7. Wisdom resides within us. I often start Open Space meetings by saying that “no angels will parachute in here to save us. Rather, the angel is all of us together.” Experts can’t do it, folks. They can be helpful but the wisdom for implementation and acting is within us. It has to be.
8. Everything is a failure in the middle, change occurs in cycles. We’re doing new things, and as we try them, many things will “fail.” How do we act when that happens? Are we tyrannized by the belief that everything we do has to move us forward?
9. Learning is the only way we become smarter about what we do. Duh. But how many of us work in environments where we have to guard against failure? Are you allowed to have a project or a meeting go sideways, or is the demand for accountability and effectiveness so overwhelming that we have to scale back expectations or lie about what we are doing.
10. Meaningful work is a powerful human motivator. What is the deepest purpose that calls us to our work and how often do we remember this?
11. Humans can handle anything as long as we’re together. That doesn’t mean we can stop tsunamis, but it means that when we have tended to relationships, we can make it through what comes next. Without relationships our communities die, individuals give up, and possibility evaporates. The time for apologizing for relationship building is over. We need each other, and we need to be with each other well.
12. Generosity, forgiveness and love. These are the most important elements in a community. We need all of our energy to be devoted to our work. If we use our energy to blame, resent or hate, then we deplete our capacity, we give away our power and our effectiveness. This is NOT soft and cuddly work. Adam Kahane has recently written about the complimentarity of love and power, and this principle, more than any other is the one that should draw our attention to that fact. Love and power are connected. One is not possible without the other. Paying attention to this quality of being together is hard, and for many people it is frightening. Many people won’t even have this conversation because the work of the heart makes us vulnerable. But what do we really get for being guarded with one another, for hoarding, blaming and despising?
We could probably do a full three workshop on these principles (and in the circle just now we agreed to!). But as key organizing principles, these are brilliant points of reflection for communities to engage in conversations about what is really going on.
Most of the indigensous languages of British Columbia are in danger of disappearing. Generations of residential schools, policies of marginalization and adaptation to English speaking society have rendered most of our communities mute in their own tongue. When I work in most places the only language you ordinarily hear is a prayer from and Elder or a conversation between to elderly speakers.
My friend Dustin Rivers is trying to change that. I’ve written before about how he is using an fun and interactive fluency game called Where Are Your Keys? To get people speaking his language, Skwxwu7mesh snichim, the language of the territory in which I live. Last week he took 16 or so kids from our homelearning support centre and taught them some basic conversational Skwxwu7mesh. In a couple of hours, the kids were identifying theings, responding to commands and directions and learning a little about the names and history of our home place.
Now Dustin is set to host a conference in Vancouver on June 5-6 for indigenous language activists from around BC to come and learn about how to use fluency games to get people using these languages so that they don’t die. Everyone is welcome. If you are interested, register and get thee to the gathering. It’s impressive what Dustin is up to and it’s EASY to learn it.
What if languages were saved and reawakened through fun? What better way to dodge the bullet?
A quote from DH Lawrence in relation to what Lost is really about:
We cannot bear connection. That is our malady. We must break away, and be isolate. We call that being free, being individual. Beyond a certain point, which we have reached, it is suicide. Perhaps we have chosen suicide. Well and good. The Apocalypse too chose suicide, with subsequent self-glorification… my individualism is really an illusion. I am a part of the great whole, and I can never escape. But I can deny my connections, break them, and become a fragment. Then I am wretched.
via What the Lost Finale is Really About | Religion Dispatches.
It has become a standard practice for me now to make a slam poem from the words of opening or closing circles, as a way to reflect to a group something of it’s wholeness. These poems are completely improvised, using the words of the participants as material. There is a lot of reincorporation of people’s words in these poems which makes for a lovely reminder when I read it out and participants shift their awareness around the circle
A poem I wrote at the end of the Open Space for Transition Nelson. One of our participants brought her two chickens to the event to look after them while she was away from her house. On day two the chickens escaped, which explains one of the lines in this piece.
Practicality, courage
Where's the agenda?
Appreciative thanks
amazed it didn't tank
This scenario is a dream and it seems that
whatever happened, happened.
Woooo….
Gratitude is the attitude of rebirth
A reenergized connection, soft walk on the earth
Want to pass a torch but also linger on the porch of this
new house created by friendship
and the magic in the talk…
We gonna rock…
I'm already looking younger, cultivating the hunger
for transitioning, repositioning,
gestating and relating, digesting and reflecting
seeing what is born this morning
feeling what is important to raise
in these days of unity, community, in what is bigger than me.
I'm new to this place
but what a face you wear -
a community of angels who care.
It's open and I'm curious to see where it goes,
two feet, ten toes
I don't know, but somebody knows
and I feel direction, infection
a virus of creative work
the explosion of potential that stars from a spark,
light sparkling in the dark.
Thanks to the angels and the bees
and all that frees us to fly, respond to the calling
pick up those that are falling
and send them back in the air.
I'm more connected than ever before
walked through a door to a store full of knowledge and inspiration
full of awe at the creation of what's going on -
knowing that together I can be strong enough
to live off the grid, draw on my own power,
this is the hour!
Even the chickens have become free!
It's hard to do this alone,
to clear a field full of stones,
to live a peace that is co-owned
bring a bell to the young,
three deep breaths,
words that rest lightly on the tongue
and hold the terror of action,
the commitment to a fraction of change
to a group that can rearrange the best of what we have -
time, ideas, muffins -
strange resources for a movement, but sustenance is a must for sustainability
so that's good.
So in the shadows of locally hewn wood
in a place free of shoulds,
I acknowledge the work we have done
and the potential of what is to come
life springing from ash,
passion leading to action,
a rekindled fire that burns off
guilt and fear.
Inspired -
our future starts here.
Been too busy to read the feed lately, but here’s some stuff:
And for your further listening pleasure: Steve Mason – All Come Down from Said the Gramaphone…very nice mellow tune.
My twitter friend Durga pointed me to this article from Euan The Potter.on the Japanese aesthetic concept of “Wabi sabi”
Etymologically, “Wabi sabi” is based on the root forms of two adjectives, both of which are generally translated as “Lonely”. “Wabishii” however focuses on the object which is lonely, where as “Sabishii” focuses on the absence which makes the object lonely. The principal of “Wabi sabi” is therefore; Beauty reduced to its simplest form, and that form brought to a peak of focus by its relationship with the space in which it exists. That is to say, the presence of an object and the presence of the space interacting to strengthen each other.
The idea that space has presence is not new. Two and a half thousand years ago the Greek philosopher Parmenides proposed that it is impossible for anything which exists to conceive of anything which does not exist and that therefore even the space between objects “exists”. This remains in modern English as the concept that “I have nothing”. In Japanese however, it is grammatically impossible for “Nothing” (Nanimo) to exist (aru). “Nothing” (Nanimo) must be followed by “Is not” (nai). The idea of the presence of a space was therefore revolutionary.
To take it one step further, a tea bowl, being a vessel, is defined by the space it contains. It is not the pot which is important, but the space. In the tea bowl it is therefore possible to have the object (Wabi) and the space (Sabi) interacting within the same pot.
I think it is fair to say that, as in the art of tea, the art of hosting works with this idea to create both containers and spaces that provide the conditions for generative activity. It’s an elusive concept, the idea of creating beauty from things that aren’t really there, but that is why we call it an art, and when it comes off well, you can feel the strength of a well held container and the quality of the enclosed space.
A poem by Ralph Copleman a longtime Open Space practitioner, posted this week on the OSLILST
The Days of Now
On the night before Now
we all clambored over
and greeted each other by the gateway.
Now came the first morning.
We opened for each other many conversations
and passed cups around the shining circle.
On the second of Now,
I could see a long way in people’s eyes
which cleared to let in the light.
On the third of Now,
everyone started dialing up tomorrows,
released laughter and embraced
every future Now with braided voices
and sweat-slicked arms.
Each night Now the sky
came down to join us,
like an animal testing the scents.
On the fourth of Now
we saw magic inside ourselves
and blew gently the embers in each other.
On the fifth day Now transformed
into pieces of hours and sounds.
There was baying and mirth
and sweet fresh rubbing of skin on skin.
The sixth of Now saw us
plain and fearful, thrilled and drawn
to each other in new forever dreams.
On the seventh of Now
we redrew all our lines,
filled all the hollows, as Now expected.
At last the night Now
draped velvet and quiet
as hushed we prepared our ascent.
This night is that night Now.
It has unquenchable questions
and the same different beginning.
On top of morning Now
and all through evening Now
we waxed and shined the circle again
sipped each other’s songs
and touched old and new alike.
I’ve just opened space at a conference here with Viv McWaters, Geoff Brown, Anne Pattillo and Johnnie Moore. We’ve got a two day, full on participatory conference on evaluation with 179 people. 40 topics have gone up for our day and a half OS.
It’s sweet for me being here in Melbourne, which for me is the spiritual home of Open Space in Australia (would you agree Brendan? :-)). Of course for me that impression largely comes from the fact that this was Father Brian Banibridge’s home, and I regret that I never made it here while he was alive, only able to meet him over the years at various OSonOS gatherings or when he stopped by our place on retreat or en route to elsewhere.
Brian of course was such a stalwart member of our community…he and Viv have hosted trainings in Australia for years and of course they took the mantle of hosting OSonOS X in 2002 after Laurel Doersam and I co-hosted it in Vancouver. It’s such a pleasure to be here working with Viv and our team in this place, with Brian’s presence very much in our mind.
And so as way of honouring Brian in our own little way today we took the unprecedented step of officially adding a fifth principle to the Open Space canon. Of course the four principles are very important and probably all we need, but Brian always posted a fifth one up when he worked: Be Prepared to be Surprised. For years I have also made a poster with that one on it and put it up in the room, but today in my opening I elevated that most excellent phrase by making it the third principle of five. It comes right after Whoever comes… and Whatever happens… Be Prepared to be Surprised. And then When it starts… and when it’s over…lovely.
It seems a perfectly natural place to put it, and, being here in Melbourne, it seemed a perfectly natural act to just say out loud “Open Space has 5 principles and one law…” Viv and I both got a little shiver up our spine, our own little testimonial to a great friend of our community of practice whose presence we miss dearly.
So from now on it’ll be five principles for me, and in reciting them I always see in my own mind Harrison’s call to simplicity, Anne Stadler’s call to take simplicity seriously (which helped Harrison get the principles right – that IS the story, right?) and Brian’s mischievous imperative to be open to surprise.
So as we prepare to gather here in Melbourne on May 11 for a little OSonOS with 40 or so local OS-workers, and our community of friends and colleagues gathers internationally in Berlin, Viv and I invite you to officially adopt Brian’s fifth principle not for sentimental reasons, but just because it makes sense, and it lightens the invitation in just the right way.
It’s all good.
Powered by WordPress with GimpStyle Theme design by Horacio Bella.
Entries and comments feeds.
Valid XHTML and CSS.