My friend Beth recently met a prominent expert on early childhood development. Beth asked him, "what does a young child most need for development?" and he replied, "open space."
Beth loves OST, so her ears perked up. "What do you mean, open space?" she asked. And he proceeded to basically describe OST, although he had never heard of the process we use in organizations! Here is a snip from a recent paper by Dr. Louis Sander (1997): "(T)he essential features of self-regulation and self-organization that are required of every living organism cannot be bypassed when we come to deal with the developing human infant... The essential requirement that each living organism be self-regulating requires that the initiative to take one or the other direction must come from within the organism itself, not from an extrinsic source... (One example) is illustrated... by the bassinet-monitoring study. This was the appearance over the course of an infant's awake period of an 'open space' (Sander, 1977) in time that allows the endogenously activated, self organizing initiative of the infant to emerge and begin the process of constructing its own idiosyncratic goals... (T)he mother puts the infant in a reclining chair where the baby can see and hear her, and goes about her other work or interests. This is a moment of disengagement, but one in a state of regulatory stability, a coherence in the infant-caregiver system as a whole. This is an open space in time when the infant's 'primary activity', its agency for generating self-organization, can take off in initiating and organizing an idiosyncratic network of proximal engagement of its own... Here we have a systems model, then, of equilibrium constructed by an enduring coordination between infant and mother over time that provides containment without impingement." * * ========================================================== [email protected] ------------------------------ To subscribe, unsubscribe, change your options, view the archives of [email protected], Visit: http://listserv.boisestate.edu/archives/oslist.html
