One of the great things about OSLIST is the way conversations start at multiple points and then ebb and flow to form a common theme. Not unlike what happens in Open Space (because it is Open Space, I guess) this phenomenon appears to be but one more example of what we have been talking about. Emergent order. And John, I guess that makes us all "anarchists" ... although I have a little trouble with the word. I concede that the literal sense is correct, but the associations lead to some directions I would rather not go. I found myself getting into the same sort of trouble when I used the word metastasis to describe what seems to happen when space is opened in an organization. It can simply be closed down, but more often than not it subtly spreads rather like a cancer. Correct idea. Nasty thought. Oh Well.
I suspect we may be one the edge of some new territory here in this discussion. The ideas have certainly appeared before, but I detect the possibility of a rather elegant formulation just hiding out at the edges. Way back in the Dark Ages (Riding The Tiger, 1991) I found myself thinking and writing about what I called then, The InterActive Learning Organization (aka The Open Space Organization). By '94 the same idea appeared in glorious new nomenclature with the arrival of The Millennium Organization. Looking back over those efforts, I have to confess that it may have been the right idea, but definitely looked at in the wrong way. Both the InterActive Learning Organization and The Millennium Organization (same thing by a new name) seemed to be something we might "do" -- as in "creating the Open Space Organization." Lovely idea, but fatally flawed, or at the very least, a waste of effort. Why create something that already exists? The problem was, we just didn't know it. So where do we go from here? I suggest starting with the basics. Really basic. It seems to me that certain fundamental forces pretty well account for our present existence. Gravity, for one, makes it possible to walk around on good old planet earth and do what we do. Perhaps we may chafe at the constraints, but truthfully there is not too much that we can do about it. The forces of self-organization provide a reasonable account for our progress from the moment of the Big Bang until this present instant. and please note, we didn't have to do a thing. It happened all by itself, or as Stuart Kaufmann would say -- Order for free. Add in one other "force" -- the power of Griefwork -- as it enables us to navigate the sometimes rocky terrain thrown up at us as we go on our self-organizing ways. The problem here is simply that as we, our organizations, and our world move along the path of self-organization, things come and go, they end. They die. Seen from some cosmic vantage point, this ending, this dying is simply a part of the natural process of things. However, when it becomes our end, or our death, cosmic vantage points become a little hard to find, and in fact everything becomes very personal. Fortunately for us, there appears to be hardwired within each one of us another natural process, which like the process of birth, brings most of us through the hard places, and that is Griefwork. At least that seems to be the story for the last 13.7 billion years (according to latest calculations, but what's a billion here or there?). Jumping to conclusions, it appears that if everything is self-organizing, everything is Open Space Organization! We're already there. We can stop working so hard trying to create what already exists, and better spend our time understanding what we already are. How do you like those bananas? And what do we say about Open Space? For those of us who may have thought we created this wild, wonderful, novel critter -- it is doubtless time to eat a large amount of humble pie. We did not create a thing. In fact Open Space by other names had been doing just fine, thank you, for billions of years. But Open Space is not without its value, for it provides us with the opportunity to consciously and intentionally be what we already are. And who knows, we might just become better at it???? The practical applications? Well for one thing, the next time a client asks, "Does Open Space always work?" -- we might answer, "Truthfully we don't really know, but it seems to have done pretty well for the past 13.7 billion years." I am not sure that I would recommend this approach, unless undertaken with a very large smile. Harrison Harrison Owen 7808 River Falls Drive Potomac, MD 20854 USA phone 301-365-2093 Open Space Training www.openspaceworld.com Open Space Institute 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