Open Space…passion and responsibility

Lilia Efimova notes that Open Space makes you the one in charge and then asks: “‘No way to delegate’ 🙂 Can we found a trigger for self-organised attitude here?”

Yup. And the keys, as Harrison Owen will say repeatedly are that OST works with passion bounded by responsibility. Passion is what gets you out of your seat, responsibility is what causes you to take action.

With these two ingredients, and the tools to support them, you have a trigger for self organizing systems in humans. Open Space embodies a dance from individual intention, to collective storytelling, to self organization to individual action. I see these patterns beginning and ending with agency, as ideas arise out in each mind and heart and work their way through the collective space of story and structure returning again to the realm of the personal for the action to happen.

There IS a way to delegate of course, and in Open Space we call this “invitation.” Instead of foisting an agenda on people, you invite them to help you, work with you, create with you, do heavy lifting with you.

It’s not easy, and you have to create the conditions to support these kinds of things, but once you have the basic structures in place, it is amazing what can happen.

Passion bounded by responsibility lovingly contained within invitation. The ingredients for the inviting organization.