Vital skill for forging our future

I am a long time member of the Open Space Listserve.  There are a lot of amazing folks and deep thinkers over there.  Today my dear friend and OS colleague, Doug Germann, posted this quote:

It is their presence in the whole, and the fact that they are helping the life of the whole, which gives them their individual life....Italics in original. Christopher Alexander, The Nature of Order: An Essay on the Art of Building and The Nature of the Universe, Book One: The Phenomenon of Life, p 431

Doug followed that up with his own observations and one of his wonderful questions:

What I am seeing here as an inside-out truth, is that in a group we do not lend the group our individual life, it goes somewhat the other way round about. What gives us our individual existence and life is our presence in the group, our helping of the group; in turn the others helping the group give us life. We intensify each other.

Can this be true?

So i chimed in and here is an expanded version of my reply:

Yes. It's about Circles of Belonging, Doug.  

Don't we feel most alive when we know we are truly significant?  That our existence matters essentially to another?  We can only see that truly reflected in the eyes of our community.  

It explains modern existential angst.  Without true community and a way to find our place in it--we find life deadened, numbing, meaningless.  The same thing is mirrored in organizations.  We have largely managed (all puns intended) to engineer an inhuman context for ourselves.  If we are to create a future where we and all the other species on our planet can thrive, we will need to understand the need for authentic significance deeply and begin working to acquire the skills and instincts to provide this to each other in the way we live and work together.

Re-membering and re-claiming the skills and patterns of connecting to the whole is a vital process for our future.  There are ways of being in community that we have forgotten (and many of us never learned).  And i don't just mean human community; i mean the WHOLE.  We also need to feel, really experientially, in our bones, feel our connection to earth and cosmos and all the life in it.  

I see groups working to emerge these ways of being.  Aikido is one place.  We work there on ourselves within a community of care, to understand the deeper connections between us; how our intentions intertwine, how our energy flows and merges, how we can learn to treat each other with delicacy.  As one teacher said, "Aikido is about caressing the soul".  It is one of the places i feel seen and feel welcomed to see others.

I see the Non-Violent Communication community working to build the skills for verbally connecting in ways that we can truly give appreciation to each other. Working to learn and teach how to communicate in ways that honour the self and the other, without harm.  

Again i am finding it hard to put words to this knowing.  In order to thrive in complexity, we need each other like never before and yet we are stuck in this vise of not having the skills we need to live and work well together.  That is the work i am passionately engaged in now.  How can we transform ourselves into who we need to be to thrive?  I have found that this work takes great personal courage to engage in.  We all carry the grief around of the wounds we have received from those who were supposed to see and love and appreciate us and who didn't.  So many are walking numbed, and deadened.  So many of us don't even know how to accept appreciation and love when we are exposed to it.  

So i say, these skills and patterns of connecting to the whole (self, family, community, world, cosmos) are vital to our future.  Vital to our individual and collective health.  Vital to life. We need to re-learn, to co-create, to co-emerge these skills and patterns of working and living well together.  

We will know we have arrived when, as Harrison Owen has recently pointed out, Open Space Technology is just one of the ways we do things.  I believe the deep inner resonance for this sense of one's place in the whole is what many people experience and enjoy about Open Space.  And Aikido.  onegai shimasu O Sensei.  I don't want to bore all you non-aikidoists, but there is a jewel at the center of Aikido--a sparkling diamond gift of finding the connection to each other and the whole that gives us life.  

Where have you found this resonance?

Foolish blessings to you all

A Happy Adventurous April Fool's Day to you all!

Foolishness i engaged in today:

1. White Rabbit, White Rabbit, White Rabbit as soon as i woke up (I love you Gracie!  I miss you Gracie!)
2. Taught a sleepy Gareth about the tradition and worked on his routine with him (he told the bro's the Easter Bunny had come!  TeeHee)
3. Took myself too seriously. (Only a little..i'm getting MUCH better ;))
4. Got on the ferry to Nanaimo, got off the Ferry in Nanaimo, took call on cell phone to say meeting was cancelled, turned around and got right back on the ferry from Nanaimo...
5. Had oatmeal and French Toast for dinner.
6. Watched Looney Tunes.
7. Engaged in a little pookoobraznost! (Please help my spelling here dear Rafushka!)
8. Blogged this (and played with tweeting all day long)  I guess you just can't call it Twittering.  That really sounds foolish!

Such an open space day.  All about letting go and letting come.  Being in the NOW.  Whatever happens. Integrating it all with a sense of joyous abandon.  Inviting intimacy with all that is--warts, alligators, tigers and all.

May you all be blessed with utter foolishness.

May, "I know nothing!" be your battle cry and prayer.

Gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble!

The Venerable Reverend High Dupess, Wendy The Valorous (Church of St. Murphy the Divine); Dr. Wendetta When, Dean of Accidental Education, Titanic University;  And Other Mystic Titles Too Arcane to Mention

Third Sector and the current economy

While governments are busy bailing out failing banks and corporations, another significant driver of our economy and our society is struggling largely in silence.  The so-called Third Sector, also known as Non-Profits or Charities.

An excerpt from the Government Non-Profit Initiative describes the scope and impact of the sector on the BC economy:

The non profit sector contributes an enormous amount to public life in British Columbia. The sector has a substantial economic presence, contributing 6.9 per cent of the province’s GDP and employing 7 per cent of the provincial workforce. The non profit sector employs more than 147,000 people (23 per cent of whom work in hospitals, colleges and universities) – a workforce larger than the total employment in the forestry, fishing, mining and oil and gas industries combined.

The non profit sector reports around $3 billion a year in revenue from provincial government sources, accounting for one-third of the sector’s total revenues. The sector contributes an additional $6 billion into the provincial economy, more than agriculture, forestry, fishing and hunting and on par with mining, oil and gas. Not included in this equation is the monetary value of over 114 million hours in volunteer time mobilized by the sector – the equivalent of 69,000 full time employees.

So, with Canadian media beginning to take some notice, it's time for the rest of us to start speaking up.  Canadian charities support our social safety net and are responsible for providing a lot of the services we have come to expect as an integral part of Canadian society.  If we want to continue to enjoy the benefits of engaged and healthy communities, we need to step forward and support our local charities.  As a fundraiser and organizational consultant, i am inviting leaders in my community to an Open Space-based meeting to plan what we can do to support our local charities in surviving the next three years.  I will be suggesting we provide resources and training workshops (for free or cost only) to our local charities to help them prepare for what lies ahead.  

So if you have a local (or national) charity that you love, sing their praises, let your local representatives know of your concern, encourage all of your networks to continue to give, and point the charity to this resource as a good place to start for ideas on how to survive. 

Web 3.0

Just can't stop now i'm started :).

I've been volunteering with a new social change initiative called Sound Connections.  Their website will be up shortly.  We've started with live meetings: Open Space Tech in a Whole Person Process wrapper.  The idea is to create a platform to connect social entrepreneurs with each other and with those who have the skills and passion to support them.  

What i've noticed:  a new trend that i call web 3.0.  We connect online to others who share our passions via web 2.0 social networking tools, then these connections become real-world as we meet in person, or create real-world projects that affect the lives of others.  I love this pattern.  It feels like the maturation of the promise of the internet.  What could have become isolating is becoming a powerful tool for real world transformation and relationship.

It's about time

It's about time i started blogging again on a regular basis don't you think?

Not possible to catch up.  So just going to jump right in.  Lots of new stuff in the cooker.  James Lemmer and I are in the final stages of launching our new company: The Collaborative Experience.   We have developed highly experiential workshops that include shadow process, genuine contact program, open space technology, integral theory, spiral dynamics, complexity theory and aikido to support teams and leaders working in collaboration locally and globally.  

New website up soon.  Watch all social media for the launch.

Opening Space for Organizational Systems Renewal

Just got back from opening space for moving to action as the afternoon portion of the annual conference of the Organizational Systems Renewal program alumni at Seattle University. It was a total delight to share the facilitation of the day with Kathy Cramer of the Cramer Institute. Her most recent book “Change how you see everything” is an accessible and graphically lovely plea for appreciative thinking and living. She refers to it as asset-based thinking, which she has found is a more readily understood and stickier term than appreciative thinking.

We had a big circle with about 100 people ranging from current MBA students, alumni, faculty, and visiting professionals. We had one good hour-and-half session. With little time and lots to do, we went with flip-charting highlights and next steps up on a gallery. We took digital pictures of that to use to create the proceedings. We had a wonderful lightning report in from our 14 topic groups, with everyone speaking very directly.

As OD professionals who had spent two years learning various whole systems change approaches, they had asked to see the very pure form. Many had experienced some derivative of OS, but few had seen a really clean opening of space. So I obliged with the cleanest, purest version I know how. The opening took the usual 20 mins and they leapt up ready to go, creating their topic groups in amazingly short time. Kathy had warmed everyone up wonderfully, so they were ready with what they wanted to work on.

It was interesting to open space in the middle of the event. I wandered off around 10:30 to continue my personal prep. Had an hour of meditation followed by finishing prepping the space during the lunch break (making signs, etc) then working on the invitational section of my opening to ensure it was focused properly and reflected the work they had done in the morning session.

The only down side, and it was slight, but I noticed it, was that we had to have the participants rearrange their chairs themselves, on the fly, into a circle. There was one area that wasn’t quite visible from the whole circle and it was a lot harder to keep their energy in the container and draw them fully into the field. I did a lot of deliberate connection walking to compensate for the odd drift in the energy at that arc of the circle.

It was a very satisfying day. Had faith in who was there, watched the folks get down to work, the magic happen, deep connections made. Met lots of people doing deep change work out in the world and many others trying to open a bit of space in large companies (including Microsoft! Hi Iris and Mary Alice!).

On hosting meaningful conversations

I am busy preparing a training manual on public speaking and public conversations for non-profit staff and volunteers. So, i have been musing a bit this morning on why i love facilitation when it is about hosting meaningful conversations.

What arose for me today was depth. I love asking the questions and holding the space for the questions that lead to depth. That let us get beyond the surface to the complexity that always is present. And i love it when that complexity gets unpacked, unfolded out in all its brilliance and unknowability. I love it when we get to a level of complexity where we must act out of the essence of who we are and not merely from what we know.