All: Peg wrote, among many other fine things:
"My experience of OS is indeed that it allows both the indivual and the group to be most fully themselves....<snip>...I want to poke a bit at this work being about consensus. I think it moves into something much richer than consensus. This may be subtle, but for me part of the power of what happens in AI, OS and/or Dialogue is that a collective understanding of essence or spirit emerges. And people act from that place. They don't necessarily act from consensus, they act from how the whole's spirit moves through them. In OS, we speak of this as passion and responsibility." Exactly. The points I made on GRP-FACL about this reflected this experience. I was essentially saying that in collectivist cultures, there is no distincition between the individual and the group to the extent that there is no distinction between an atom and a living body. They can't exist in the same way without each other, so in this respect, the individual and the group both come into their own only when they are moving together. In the Mohawk system of governance, a chief who blocks consensus for selfish reasons may be removed by his clan mother and ultimately exiled unless he learns to see what he's doing. He's actually spoken of as being "dead" to the Nation after such an exile. That is how important it was in traditional Mohawk society to be aware of the role you play within a group, and to exercise your responsibility to hold space as a participant. What I see happening in Open Space is people gradually realizing that all the tools they need are in the room. In fact this is a line I use in my opening quite often:"All the tools you need are here; the wall, the computers, the people and the circle. All of these are tools that have been assembled for your use." Most First Nations people know what I mean when I talk about the circle being a tool. It's exactly what Peg says...the individual and the group come fully into themselves. Dialogue, it seems to me, expresses these same ideas in a different way, and I especially like the part about having the facilitator, in Bohm's words "hold the context." I go further when I'm working with traditional consensus decision-making processes, and look at every individual to "hold the context." This applies in Open Space too, which is as close to the old ways of just doing consensus. It works really welll when people, motivated by their passion nad responsibility, all agree to hold the space. I'm dying to have one like that, so I can go off and have a nap, just like Harrison taught me. In the final analysis, with both consensus and Open Space, I think the same adage holds true: if you have to think about it you can't possibly be doing it. Merry, happy, joy joy joy... Chris