A little piece I’ve just written about Harrison Owen’s work on High Performance Systems for an Art of Participatory Leadership workbook on the connections between Open Space Technology facilitation and leadership for self-organization.
From the moment Open Space was formalized as a meeting method in 1985, its creator, Harrison Owen, saw massive potential for the process to inform organizational design and leadership. Watching groups of 100 or more people self-organize a conference over multiple days was simply a microcosm of what could go on in organizational life. It offered a radical view that perhaps there was a different way to organize and a different way to lead when we are confronted with complexity and chaos.
In many ways, Open Space Technology was the doorway to the participatory leadership approaches championed by the Art of Hosting community. In his book Wave Rider: Leadership for High Performance in a Self-Organizing World, Owen shares his observation that what he saw happening in Open Space meetings was a practical expression of what organizational scholars were observing in high-performance teams. He formulated this working hypothesis:
High Performance is the productive interplay of diverse, complex forces, including chaos, confusion, and conflict, characterized by holiness, health, and harmony. it is harmonious, including all elements of harmony, both consonance and dissonance, in that multiple forces work together to create a unitary flow. It is whole in the sense that there is a clear focus, direction, and purpose. It is healthy in that the toxins of its process (metabolic byproducts in organisms) are eliminated effectively and without prejudice to itself or its environment. High Performance can never be sustained at the cost of a fouled nest. A High Performance System is one that does all of the above with excellence over time, and certainly better than the competition.
Harrison Owen. Wave Rider: Leadership for High Performance, p. 35
To create the conditions for high performance, Owen turned to what he had learned from facilitating Open Space Technology meetings. Creativity springs from urgency, passion (including conflict) and responsibility. It is facilitated by providing leaders with the time and space to organize their work and choose the places where they make a maximum contribution of learning or doing, and essentially getting out of the way of work. When these conditions are in place, and the leader simply holds the space for self-organization, a high-performing System will emerge.
In Wave Rider, Owen provides three simple principles for leaders to create these spaces:
- “Never work harder than you have to.” Let the managers manage, and as a leader, focus only on what is yours to do. Take action that feeds the system with resources of time, money, and connection and holds space for outcomes to emerge.
- “Don’t fix it if it ain’t broke.” This requires a leader to be patient and wait for the system’s wisdom to emerge. Too often, leaders respond to their own anxiety and discomfort with uncertainty by rushing to a solution or constraining their people to deliver something—ANYTHING—on time and under budget. For complex problems, staying open longer and allowing people to self-organize and explore many options for moving forward will increase the chances of novelty and innovation.
- “Never, ever, think you are in charge.” The myth of control lies at the heart of much management and organizational leadership literature. The assumption is that if you simply maintain control of the situation, including focusing on accountability for deliverables and directing efforts in a single direction, you will hit your KPIs and achieve a return on investment. The reality is that things are much more messy than that, Understanding that the leader is never solely in charge of the whole system liberates the leader to address situations with curiosity and invitation and builds the conditions for co-creation.
Owen explored these principles and approaches alongside the emergence of the World Wide Web and the idea that organizations could become more flexible and agile if they self-organized in networks around core purposes. New organizational forms and emerged in the 1990s and 2000s, enabled by the web’s ability for people to find each other and resources quickly. Manufacturing was revolutionized by agile approaches to product development, and organizational development became informed by complexity and dialogic practices often based on experiences formed using large-scale self-organizing meeting methods like Open Space Technology. The dynamics of self-organization were harnessed to create currency systems and governance models, which required leaders to be more like facilitators or hosts than dictators or controllers.
Participatory leadership is a set of practices rooted in the need to create spaces of creative self-organization and collective responsibility for new responses to complex and emergent problems. Facilitating Open Space Technology meetings is a tangible way to explore and practice these transferable skills from a single gathering to years-long project management to creating entire organizational structures.
When we are teaching dialogue practice and participatory meeting design, I often draw on the example of organizational and team staff meetings. Every organization I’ve worked with has these meetings and they ae almost nearly the same: an endless re-iteration of what people are doing, and rarely nothing more compelling that an email wouldn’t take care of. There is rarely even time for discussion becasue you have to get through everyone’s update in the 30 minutes assigned for the meeting.
So I often advise folks who want to bring more participatory culture to their organizations to focus on staff meetings. Rotate leadership, get serious about pruning out stuff that can be done by email and replace it with dialogue. After all, 30 minutes with an open agenda is a great place to brainstorm and discuss the thorny questions that are are dogging your team.
Today I cam across a great post from Tom Kerwin addressed to team leaders to help change their staff updates. I like this becasue it builds a container for team members to think about their work and share it in a way that makes it clear and helpful to others. (I’ve often said that if you’re having trouble explaining what you do, try to tell you great-aunt or your teenager about it.)
At any rate, here’s how Tom has re-designed his team’s update meetings:
I asked everyone to give a mini-pitch. In one minute, tell us:
- What’s the main challenge your team is tackling right now?
- What approach are you using to help your team tackle it?
- What are you looking for to tell you if your approach is working?
- And what are you looking for to tell you if your approach isn’t working?
I designed this to follow a key complexity principle: don’t try to change people, instead change their interactions. I designed this particular interaction to be a kind of ‘intuition-pump’ that could indirectly generate beneficial effects. And it did.
Here are five cool things it ended up doing:
- Everyone on my team got to practise pitching their work so that it would make sense to others and not only to themselves. This is a valuable skill in business. It took some repetitions to get this working, but we started live in low pressure small groups to lower the barrier and enable people to learn from each other. We could choose to switch to asynchronous written pitches when the ritual was stable.
- In order to figure out a pitch, each person had to understand why they were doing what they were doing for themselves. People started to develop a sense for different shapes and contexts of work, rather than sticking to one tool or process.
- I could instantly tell when someone was confused about what they were doing because their pitch either didn’t add up internally or didn’t cohere with the team’s strategy. We could grab time right then and there to figure it out together – before they’d spent days on pointless stuff. And this happened less over time.
- We started to enjoy the progress updates. I’ll use a food analogy. Before the change to the meeting format, it felt like we had to sit through people droning on about their food shopping lists. Afterwards, we got to hear chefs inspiring us with the delicious meals they were preparing.
- And folks on different teams started to actually understand what their colleagues were working on. This meant fewer complaints about not having enough visibility, and much more spontaneous collaboration.
I was reflecting today with a friend on the nature of the world right now. We were discussing some of the story collections I have from the early part of the pandemic when I was running Participatory Narrative Inquiry projects with organizations seeking to understand the effects of the pandemic on their services. It’s hard to remember that time, and it’s very hard to remember the “before-times,” as people call them. But reading these stories reminded me of what we all did together all of a sudden. It was meant to be a short-term intervention in our lives. It wasn’t.
I think the pandemic has fundamentally altered our reality. I remember the 2010s as a time when we were starting to get some things right, and for me, that positive aspect of the decade really took shape in the way public transportation was developing in the Vancouver region. During the 2010s, Vancouver built a light rail extension to the airport, began building a subway across the Broadway corridor on the west side of the city and rapidly increased the number of express bus routes and connections, even out to the suburbs. This whole era seemed like one where the focus was on connecting people for a larger public good. It symbolized a collective and concrete commitment to our region’s well-being.
But when the pandemic began, much of that progress halted, and we lost many of those public services because people stopped commuting and meeting in person. On our little island, a successful community-operated express bus ceased running downtown. Our late-night water taxi service disappeared. Deep in the city, streets were taken over for patios, and folks started living outside a little more leading to the establishment of more bike infrastructure. But the return to public transit was slow and still hasn’t reached pre-pandemic levels (as of last year, anyway). People are Uber-ing and using car share programs like Evo, but we’re not getting in the bus. We don’t have to. Lots of us work from home now. It is getting more and more individual.
And that’s what seems to have captured the shift for me. I have no data to back this up – maybe you do – but this shift has led to a diminishment of shared public experiences, replaced by individual, isolated realities. Ironically, while we aimed to work together to to protect each other from the virus, the measures we took dissolved the sense of collective public good into fragmented personal experiences. In fact, I think the reason that so many people feel manipulated and react with a strong desire for “freedom from the government” has to do with the fact that the response to the pandemic required us all to participate but left no space for us to co-create, at least not by the second half of 2020. The early weeks and months were full of community effort locally and our skills were all called into action. Being a person with online hosting skills meant that I could offer a weekly zoom call for local businesses here to keep folks apprised of the supports that were available to them and help them connect to efforts that were ongoing to keepbrikcs and morter businesses solvent during the March – June closures.
That began to change towards the end of the year when folks started getting fed up with the restrictions. We longed to be left alone. We resented governments telling us what to do. We started to see a massive rise in the rhetoric of separation, whether it was deeply individualistic calls for action or movements that pointed fingers, blamed others and backed into relationships to form movements, like the Freedom Convoy in Canada.
As we slowly emerge from this period, it’s evident that our minds and ways of thinking have been irrevocably changed. The information we consume through our devices hasn’t helped us make sense of this transformation; instead, it often exacerbates the confusion and sense of disconnection. We don’t want anyone telling us what to do. We are forgetting how to make things together, other than networks of outrage.
On top of the health crisis, we’ve faced a kind of psychological and cultural trauma. This hyper-individual experience of a global event has left many feeling helpless and detached. Change-making, which requires us to act together to serve a public good, often fails to recognize the deeper, collective nature of our challenges. We see many individual actions without much organizing, connection or collective effort to work with power, policy and resources. Outrage is close at hand. This disconnection and frustration manifest because people feel they’re doing something significant, yet it’s hard to see how these actions fit into the larger picture of systemic change.
Moreover, this period’s grief and unresolved emotions linger in our collective psyche. Many of us were forced into self-reflection during the lockdowns, confronted with who we are and what our lives mean. There is a ton of lateral violence out there right now: people taking out anger and aggression at others for small or even presumed transgressions. We can probably all tell stories of being on the end of a tirade from someone, and probably many of us have stories where WE lost it against someone out of proportion to whatever irritation provoked the outbursts. This unresolved grief remains within our systems as we try to “return to normalcy,” highlighting the need for deeper healing and integration of these experiences.
We were never going to return to normalcy, though. We are in a different place than we were and I cannot put my finger on it. I’d love to hear your reflections on what it has been like. Many of us who work with groups as facilitators have noticed a difference in how groups work. I see fear and reluctance to engage. I think lots of us are regressing in our ability to sit face-to-face with one another and have conversations, especially around hard issues. While I have experienced tremendous healing in hosting conversations and participatory initiatives, I have also seen initiatives fizzle. Folks are increasingly asking me to host Open Space meetings because they just need to put ideas out there and talk about them.
I have a growing desire to understand this state of affairs and put my finger on it in a way others recognize. I have been reading novels set in other pandemic times, but it seems that none of the brilliant authors I have read have caught on to the psychological effects of the pandemic on the collective psyche. I’m not seeing it in films or TV shows, either. It’s as if what we went through has been erased or skipped over in our collective history. We aren’t really telling the story of it, nor are we telling stories that acknowledge it. Has anyone read a novel that spans the years 2019 to now? Let me know. How are you seeing what’s happening?
I’ve been going down a bit of a rabbit hole these past few mornings, looking at some commentary and writing about Kurt Lewin. Lewin, who died in 1947 was a psychologist whose theory and research had a tremendous influence on the modern movements or organizational development, action research, Gestalt theory, change management and group dynamics. To read his writings now is to read a person deeply interested in the complexity of human systems long before there was much language at all available to even discuss complexity.
His ideas – or more precisely other people’s ideas about his ideas – have been largely responsible for the way mainstream organizational change is conceived and thought about.
One example is the theory of change attributed to Lewin that is known as “Change As Three Steps” or CATS. This theory is reduced to an incredibly simplistic set of moves called “Unfreeze –> Move –> Refreeze”. Looks simple enough to use right away and authentic enough because it can be attributed to Lewin. Lots of consultancies uncritically use this model, and even a cursory glance at Lewin’s work would make it clear that he would never make change that simple or linear.
The fact is that Lewin never proposed this set of moves, and it’s not even clear if he ever used the terms “freezing and unfreezing.” The rabbit holes I’ve been down started with a paper from 2015 that showed up in my feed by Stephen Cummings, Todd Bridgman, and Kenneth G Brown called “Unfreezing change as three steps: Rethinking Kurt Lewin’s legacy for change management.” This is SUCH a great critique of how Lewin’s ideas have been misattributed and misused. Lewing is the victim of a classic strawman argument, where something simplistic is attributed to him, and then folks pile on saying that his work is simplistic. Meanwhile. the work he did do is ignored or lies unread.
And that is a tremendous shame, because that paper led me to look at some of Lewin’s writings again and some of the papers about him. I got especially interested in his work on Field Theory, which is a term used in the world I travel in quite a bit. The Presencing world is predicated on working with “social fields” and lots of facilitators talk about “sensing the field” and so on. In my experience the uses of the terms “field” feels like a softer, more approachable, but more mystical way of describing complexity in human systems. Some might call it a “fluffy bunny” approach to complexity, but anything applied without much rigour can be that.
Lewin’s work is really worth a long look. His work is important because it embeds human behaviour in a set of contexts that influence change and stability. This was pretty groundbreaking in Western thought especially thinking that was rooted in Cartesian theories of mind and behavioural psychology. Lewin called that context in which we are all embedded “the life-space” which represents a field of influences that creates what we might now call “affordances” for behaviour. Lewin’s work anticipates ecological psychology, the effects of trauma, anthro-complexity, systems theory and other approaches to organization, culture, and human behaviour.
The implications for this idea are pretty clear, and a 1991 paper by Malcolm Parlett called “Reflections on Field Theory” in the British Gestalt Journal articulates five principles of Field Theory that are quite useful for thinking about change. In that paper, Parlett reflects on five principles of Field Theory that are rooted in Lewin’s work and influenced by subsequent thinkers like Gregory Bateson, Gary Yontef and Carl Hodges. The principles are:
- The Principle of Organization which states that field are organized by what I would now call “constraints” and that changes to these organizing forces will result in changes to what happens within the field.
- The Principle of Contemporaneity says that what matters in the field is the present. While history helps to explain how the field is currently organized, there is no special causal weight given to actual events that have happened in the past. However, it is important to understand how a person in the present has made sense of those events because that is what guides behaviour. To me, this is an acknowledgement of the limitations of retrospective coherence for making sense of the present and also an important insight for trauma-informed practice.
- The Principle of Singularity which states that each situation is unique and therefore requires a unique response. This clearly acknowledges the limitations of best practices on dynamic fields. Generalizations are of limited use and every moment needs to be approached afresh to find the affordances of timing and opportunity that allow for some actions to be easier to accomplish than others.
- The Principle of Changing Process which acknowledges that the field is in constant change. This is why the metaphor of unfreezing – moving – refreezing is of such little utlilty. It is predicated on a knowable stability in a system that simply isnt’ present. If one’s change management strategy is predicated on that, one is walking into a dark alley of surprise with a dangerous and blissful assumption of certainty.
- The Principle of Possible Relevance which points to the fact that in an interconnected field of actors and effects, anything can be a locus for change. And because we just don;t know which points in a field will be the most relevant in any given time, Snowden’s approach of multiple, parallel safe-to-fail probes can teach us a lot about the potential for change that takes us in the desired direction of travel.
In 1991, I finished an honours thesis that tried to use several theories and approaches to traditional knowledge, postmodern ethnography, critical theory, sociology and organizational development theory to create a new way of looking at organizational culture in Indigenous organizations. It was admittedly a little pompous for an honours thesis. Still, it led me in the direction of curiosity toward complexity and epistemologies that were rooted in more holistic ways of knowing. It would have been great to have Parlett’s paper back then and a better understanding of Gestalt approaches, to make the case in the academy that such ideas were not ONLY rooted in the marginalized worlds of “traditional knowledge” at that time but were in fact a long-standing part of the western intellectual traditional of behaviour, culture, and action in organizations.
Ove the years I have been aware of Lewin’s influence in the fields in which I work, especially organizational development. But I have to confess that I didn’t take an active interest in his work because I saw how it was used, especially CATS. It turns out that Lewin never developed CATS as a theory, and his actual work is much more interesting, especially as a source of some of the vestigial ideas and language that is present in the “field” in which I work. His work deserves a broader reading for those of us wanting to ground our practices in the history of thinkers like him and Mary Parker Follett and others who dreamed us into being 100 years ago.
In this video, Harrison Owen discusses the chaos that is disrupting the order we take for granted and begins to create a new order and a different world. Harrison has been saying much the same thing for his entire career, starting with his dissertation on Aramaic and associated mythologies and cosmologies. He has been a long-time student of the dance of chaos and order, and his development of Open Space Technology came from this lifelong inquiry.
i encountered Open Space first through an event that was hosted by Anne Stadler and Angeles Arien in 1995, and I met Harrison for the first time in 1998 at a one-day session at Simon Fraser University where he sat and taught about chaos and order, self-organization, organizational transformation and Open Space just through telling stories and sending us into a little bit of Open Space. Harrison’s work ignited two major threads in my life’s work: the facilitation of self-organizing dialogue processes, and a fiery curiosity about how complex systems work.
This talk opened a recent gathering of Open Space facilitators on the Power of Love, Not Knowing and Open Space. These are the stories and insights Harrison has been sharing for his whole career. What I love about him is his embrace of the fundamental simplicity of working with complexity and facilitating Open Space. It’s mind-boggling to me (and him) why people seem so predisposed to make Open Space far more complicated than it needs to be. We understand why: it’s about losing control and being unable to deal with the discomfort of uncertainty. Fear, power and ego come into play, and people lose the ability to act resourcefully.
It’s lovely to watch him teaching and encouraging people to do the simple things well and get out of the way of the work that groups of people can do.
Enjoy this video. He’s been a mentor and an inspiration for me for 25+ years. We do indeed love you, Harrison.