Some notes from three days of teaching a small cohort of leaders in the art of participatory leadership. —- When we teach the four fold practice of the art of hosting (also the art of participatory leadership) I’ve taken to doing it in a World Cafe. We use Cafe to essentially recreate the conditions that created the insights of the four fold practice 25 or so years ago. We invite people to tell stories of engaging and meaningful conversations they have experienced, look at these stories together for insights about what made them engaging and meaningful and provide and three …
I finally managed to update all the broken links and misplaced resources on my Open Space Technology resources and planning pages. If you now visit the Open Space Planning page and the Open Space Resources page, all the links should be working. Anything you can’t find there is likely to be found at the Open Space World home including a library of books and papers from Harrison Owen. Thanks for everyone who kept poking at me to get this done.
Harrison, one of the last times I saw him. I’m on holiday in Portugal about to start a six-day walking trip in the Algarve and I’ve just learned that Harrison Owen died yesterday. His son Barry posted a brief notice on Facebook today. I had a lovely talk with him a couple of weeks ago before I left on this trip. We talked about some things he was reading (he recommended a new edition of “Order out of Chaos: Man’s New Dialogue with Nature” by Ilya Prigogine and Isabell Stengers) and we talked a bit about family and time of …
By way of Peggy Holman, I was pointed to this video of an Open Space meeting recently held in Balama, Liberia. It’s a sweet thing, because Harrison Owen was deeply inspired by the village of Balama where he worked in the 1960s as part of the US Peace Corps. He attributes some of his inspiration for Open Space Technology to his experiences there, working with local folks as they organized and developed their community.
One of the hundreds of Open Space Technology Principles posters I have used in my time, this one from an Art of Hosting training in Minnesota in 2012, and designed by a team member. NOTE: I edited the title of this to make it clear that I’m not calling Harrison a “shaman,” but rather trying to correct a meme that has been going around which has appropriated his work. There is a post going around on the internet called “The Four Laws of the Shaman” or the “Four Laws of Spirituality.” The four laws are ascribed to some unknown shaman …