 by Flemming Funch
Open Space is one of my favorite modes of having a conference, or of organizing things. Michael Herman has an excellent page with lots of resources about Open Space Technology. Harrison Owen is the guy who called it that, and is considered the originator. Open Space is essentially that the participants create the structure, and they choose the topics to work on. Typically it starts with individuals standing up to suggest topics to focus on, which they're also willing to lead, and they put a sign up on a board, or something similar. Then people gravitate towards the topics they want to work on, and groups form. People are free to choose where they belong. If they change their mind, they can go somewhere else. Whoever shows up, its the right thing, even if nobody shows up for a certain topic. It is an organic free market of human interaction. When it works, it is extremely powerful and effective. I love Open Space.
From one of Michael Herman's pages: "When he looked back on the first handful of years of practicing Open Space Technology, Harrison concluded that Open Space works best when four key conditions are present: when the the tasks to be done are highly complex, when the people who are needed to do them are personally, professionally, or simply geographically diverse, when there is real or potential conflict, and when the decision time was yesterday."
Hm, interesting. It works best when the tasks at hand are complex, and the people are diverse. Makes sense. The more complex the situation and the players are, and the more we're in a hurry, the more we need to just let them get down to it, to work things out organically. Because nobody is really qualified to come along and pretend that they know in advance how it is all supposed to be played out. The truest answer to what to do in complex situations is: "It depends".
The above page was mentioning Angeles Arrien's "The Four-Fold Way", which boils down to: "Show up, pay attention to what has heart and meaning, speak your truth, and let it go." I like that. Well, actually, there are several versions of this kind of universal, simple, powerful advice. I think my favorite version, which I don't know where comes from, is:
Show up
Pay attention
Speak your truth
Do your best
Don't be attached to the outcome |
Wow, weird, I just discovered a Russian webpage about me. I don't know what it says. But it is part of a site I found first, which has the Russian translation of my Transformational Processing books. First one here. I'm really happy that somebody went to the trouble of putting them up on the net, and that they're apparently useful to some people, whom I can't all speak with. ...Ah, I get it. It is Dimitri in Kiev, who translated the books in the first place. Thanks Dimitri!
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