Chris wrote: "So I'm increasingly thinking that there is no such thing as empowerment. I just don't see it being possible to empower others."
Thank you for your thoughts Chris, it is the same with motivation - another people cannot motivate me, it comes from within. What we/others can do is to create opportunities, and environments so that I am able to motivate myself! And can we have something better than Open Space to create these opportunities, to remind us (and probably most the management) that we already know everything there is to know - it is more of finding the knowledge within again. All the best Eva Basta halsningar Eva P Svensson ............................................................................ ............ EPS Human Invest AB "Verksamhetsutveckling genom manniskor" Anasbergsvagen 22 S-439 34 ONSALA Tel & Fax 0300-615 05 Mobil 0706 - 89 85 50 e...@epshumaninivest.se -----Ursprungligt meddelande----- Fran: OSLIST [mailto:osl...@listserv.boisestate.edu]For Chris Corrigan Skickat: den 15 februari 2003 17:05 Till: osl...@listserv.boisestate.edu Amne: Re: OST and decolonization Harrison: I use that line about disempowerment all the time. The empowerment thing is a funny one, but over the years, working with Open Space I have learned that it is really only possible to disempower somebody, not to empower them. People empower themselves, people only disempower others. The kind of power we're talking about of course is the power of spirit, and that which enables us to move and make movement. Most of us spend our lives having this power whittled away by different people and institutions, be they political, educational, social, economic or what have you. Occasionally people find their power again. Sometimes they fully reclaim it. How else does one explain Mahatma Gandhi, Rigoberta Menchu, Nelson Mandela, Aun Sung Suu Kyi and many other men and women who, at some point during their lives have seemed to have more power than all of their contemporaries and most of their oppressors? Nobody empowered these people. No one said "now you have the ability to do your work." I think all of these people chose their work and embarked upon it, and in so doing became engaged with spirit. Spirit is what got them going and kept them moving. So I'm increasingly thinking that there is no such thing as empowerment. I just don't see it being possible to empower others. This is an old learning from Open Space, indeed it stick out of the old green user's guide as a pull quote somewhere. To say "I empower others" is to shut down space totally. I was recently discussing the two questions that lie at the heart of OST facilitation practice ("What do you really want to do? Fine, why don't you take care of it?") with a participant in Open Space. She was saying that at first blush, those questions could feel very disempowering. I replied that this probably had more to do with the scale of the initial expectations. For example, she really wanted to make something akin to world peace. When I asked "why don't you take care of it?" she gave a litany of reasons, including just how much time it would take. So I asked her the questions again. The next answer was "make more time - do that by re prioritizing her work." If world peace was truly what she wanted to make, all she needed to do was make it the most important thing in her life. Gandhi had the same 24 hours in a day as the rest of us. The point is that one's power begins to be reclaimed as the scale of the work becomes more and more human. Who knows how one makes world peace, really? One thing we know for sure is that it takes commitment and time, and those are things that people CAN do. And then when the law of two feet kicks in and people start doing things like learning and contributing, suddenly "empowerment" breaks out all over the place. Coming out of Open Space meetings with clients I often talk about the changes in an organization being undertaken by those who can do them. In one story of mine, with a government department that was becoming an agency, a major issue was the employment status of the employees. Would they lose their sonority, benefits and pensions? It was a big question, important to everyone and the answer was unknown. A receptionist in the department indicated that everything else about the change was peanuts compared to this for her, but it was frustrating in that she couldn't do anything about it. To the credit of the senior management, they committed to meeting on a conference call and discussing this issue the week after our OST meeting with the intention of ensuring the job security that was important to their employees. Collectively they could influence the right people and agencies in the right way. It was simply a question of what to do, rather than "How in the world.?" And the receptionist, upon hearing the senior management personally commit to the conference call, declared proudly that she would gladly set up the call. She certainly could have chosen to express her wishes through her union or another confrontational venue, but it was enough for her to speak from her heart and then do what she could to facilitate the outcome she wanted. And in then end, the job security issue was resolved satisfactorily. What I love about this whole way of thinking about empowerment is that it is the dynamic of invitation that is at work in the empowering moment. It is the invitation that Spirit drops in front of us which says "pssssst..walk this way." that begins our journey to finding the freedom to do our own work. Harrison, you ask what we may do with all of this, and all I can do is agree with you - do it more. As a consultant, people invite me into their communities and organizations to help them do work, and they are sometimes more than a little surprised when I show up only with the intent to open space. I can't "help" anyone really, but I can maybe draw attention to the constant invitation from Spirit that swirls around us, and use my role as a facilitator to simply let people find that for themselves. In fact since I have acquired my Tibetan bells, I have had several people say to me that they think that the bells do this all on their own. When they ring to begin the meeting, suddenly there is a different awareness in the room. Something is about to be different. This is not like any other meeting. And in fact it is like every other meeting in that the same people are there, the same issues lie in the heart of each person, and folks may even be sitting in the same circle that they always sit in. What is different is simply the fact there is no agenda, and there is this guy we've never met who is pointing out four universal principles and one universal law that we forgotten about. And somehow out of all that, people find their power and start lighting up like fire flies. I believe that we can do no more or less than Open Space. If there is a better way to do this, then I'm certainly open to it, but I think this may be one case where we may already be there. Chris --- CHRIS CORRIGAN Consultation - Facilitation Open Space Technology Bowen Island, BC, Canada http://www.chriscorrigan.com <http://www.chriscorrigan.com> ch...@chriscorrigan.com -----Original Message----- From: OSLIST [mailto:osl...@listserv.boisestate.edu] On Behalf Of Harrison Owen Sent: Saturday, February 15, 2003 4:02 AM To: osl...@listserv.boisestate.edu Subject: Re: OST and decolonization At 04:58 PM 2/14/2003 -0800, CHRIS CORRIGAN wrote: He said that at the end of the day he realized that this kind of expectation is what cultural assimilation is all about; that we expect others to set the agenda and tell us what our work is supposed to be. He concluded that Open Space works well because it invites us to do our own work. In that fundamental and simple act, OST begins to unlock a lot of years of conditioned thinking, and reveals the possibility of truly decolonized communities: communities where we do our own work. Marvelous, Chris! The experience recounted matches that of groups with which I have worked, and many more facilitated by the likes of Elwin Guild, Mikk Sarv, and John Engle. In a word, the experience is not unique, but the statement is -- at least in terms of its simplicity and directness. I am not quite sure what we do with all this except -- more of the same. But I do think it is very worth while to closely consider what is going on here and how we might better assist the progress. This is a tricky one, for our role clearly must be both supportive AND invisible. I find it to be true that every time I do something for somebody, to some extent I dis-empower them. Harrison Harrison Owen 7808 River Falls Drive Potomac, MD 20854 USA phone 301-365-2093 Open Space Training www.openspaceworld.com <http://www.openspaceworld.com/> Open Space Institute www.openspaceworld.org <http://www.openspaceworld.org/> Personal website http://mywebpages.comcast.net/hhowen/index.htm osl...@listserv.boisestate.edu To subscribe, unsubscribe, change your options, view the archives of osl...@listserv.boisestate.edu Visit: http://listserv.boisestate.edu/archives/oslist.html * * ========================================================== osl...@listserv.boisestate.edu ------------------------------ To subscribe, unsubscribe, change your options, view the archives of osl...@listserv.boisestate.edu, Visit: http://listserv.boisestate.edu/archives/oslist.html