My buddy Harrison Owen has been writing like crazy a lot lately. He has been almost singlehandedly keeping the conversation going on the OSLIST, where Open Space practitioners gather to play. And the other day he launched a new paper into the mix: Opening Space for The Question.
The paper is about the concept of Nichtwissen, a German word that Harrison translates as “Unknowing”. Open Space for the Question means to cultivate a practice that has us sitting in the Unknowing, working to find where the contemplation of the question takes us. In a really good synopsis of the practice that gets us there, Harrison writes:
There is a phrase, perhaps even a practice, that comes I believe from the Quaker Tradition. It is “sitting the question.” The notion is a simple one, however hard it may be to implement for impatient knowledge seekers. When deep questions arise, Stop! Don’t move a muscle; keep your fingers off the keyboard and away from Google. Don’t talk to a soul and avoid the library. Just wallow in the question, savor it, and consider it from all angles. Go under it, around it, inside. And for goodness sake, don’t even think about an answer, for surely as the sun rises, any answer you think of will be premature. And a premature answer will not only be irrelevant, but it will also prevent you from experiencing the bitter-sweet moments that arise when sitting the question. And who knows, as you sit it may happen that the question evaporates into thin air, in which case you are spared the thankless task of finding an answer to a meaningless question. Then again, the question may become deeper and you will be consumed with the possibilities of not-knowing, and your Possibility Space will have expanded almost without limit. Nichtwissen will have given its gift.
This is what is required for emergence to happen if a large group of people are to generate innovative responses to the question before which they are sitting. It ultimately comes down to a personal practice of opening and a personal practice of grounding with a whole lot of communication and social trial and error in between.
[tags]open-space, facilitation, practice[/tags]
Merlin Mann found Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi’s secret to maintaining flow:
“The only solution to achieve enduring happiness, therefore, is to keep finding new opportunities to refine one’s skills: do one’s job better or faster, or expand the tasks that comprise it; find a new set of challenges more appropriate to your stage of life. Paradoxically, the feeling of happiness is only realized after the event. To acknowledge it at the time would only serve as distraction.”
This from an article in The Times called “The secrets of happiness.” Worth a read don’t you think?
I have experienced intense happiness and flow in the middle of an activity before. Once, playing at the launch of a CD of Irish music, in the middle of a set of reels (actually it was at the start of the B part of Over the Moor to Maggie) I was overcome with such intense happiness that I experienced a feeling like a star exploding in my chest. I began to weep with joy at the music we were making, and more importantly, the camaraderies of the musicians and the groove we were in. I had to stop playing and just close my eyes and experience the moment. It was one of the most amazing experiences of my life.
Definitely a distraction to the task at hand!
At WorldChanging you will find a link to an amazing site of visualizations of complex networks.
What is especially interesting to me about these maps is how many of them are actually
hierarchical. Many of these maps show complex relationships, but they do so in a flattened way. For example, this diagram (at right) is a radial representation of an organizational map from 1924. On the face of it it looks radically different, but in fact it is a relatively well formed hierarchy with single reporting relationships and only a cursory acknowledgment of horizontal organizational structure in management.
Non-hierarchical, emergent systems are represented well on the site, with this example of a neuron map of a worm brain being really fascinating.
Some of the maps at the site capture complexity in another dimension by creating living maps that change with your focus, like this map of del.icio.us links that you can customize for your own bookmarks.
Finally there are flow chart systems like the ones on world government that seek to understand complex systemic processes
A couple of stories about truth and stories. 
Yesterday on CBC Radio’s Sounds Like Canada, Shelagh Rogers interviewed Paul Rosen. Paul Rosen is the goaltender for Canada’s Sledge Hockey team, and is getting ready to head over to Turin to compete in the Paralympics.
Rosen is an amputee, having lost his leg to a persistent bacterial infection. Very early on in his new life as a one legged man he adopted a very positive outlook. His doctors were suspicious and sent him to a psychiatrist for an evaluation. At that consultation, Rosen took some water and poured it on his stump. He said to the doctor “I can water this stump five times a day for the rest of my life and the leg won’t grow back.
Faced with that reality, there were only two options: become depressed, or see the amputation as an opportunity to be a better person. Fully aware that neither option would bring back his leg, he opted for the second one.
You can hear the full interview with Paul Rosen here (opens a RealMedia file)
On the ferry coming home today I was talking with a friend who was trying to adopt a positive attitude but who thought that doing so was glossing over the reality of pain and suffering in the world. He said that he couldn’t see the glass as half-full, only half-empty. We talked for a while and I asked him what was actually true about the half full glass. We agreed that what was actually true was that an 8oz glass has 4oz of water in it. Whether you saw that as half full or half empty was entirely up to you. There was no more truth to one story than the other. Believing one over the other was not going to change the fact that there is only 4oz of water in that 8oz glass.
This is the difference between truth and stories. And so confronted with these two competing stories, why not choose the one that serves life?
[tags]paul-rosen, sledge-hockey, paralympics, stories[/tags]
Alright, I made the switch to WordPress.
Like every big move, the decision to do so was simple, the mechanics slightly harder and the final touches will take awhile. At any rate, if you are reading this in a newsreader, you won’t notice much difference. For those of you with more of an eye to template, please bear with me. Like moving to any new house, it will take a while to redecorate.
Overall though, happy to be here in WordPress land.