This was my post on the Open Space listserve board today:

What I love most about open space is the many levels of process freedom that participants empower themselves and each other with … the open invitation to post freely, to move freely, to record freely, to take responsibility freely, to affiliate and collaborate freely. The process freedom that open space puts in the hands of participants speaks to the unique value of open space.

If I can welcome a delicious facilitator nap or bit of quiet Tibetan meditation in the middle of everything, why should I think about telling people what they should talk about, how, when, and with whom? If based on this, someone feels that open space is not right for certain groups at certain times, well, then surely something else will be …

I did an Open Space event tonight with 60 community people, generating over 70 ideas in a short timeframe. What did people like? They loved choosing their own agenda, choosing their own conversations, and yes there were ample butterflies and bumblebees following the law of two feet, including those with 4 feet (walkers).

The focus: How can we make this a more elder-friendly community?

What was the most interesting exchange of the night? This was a civic event, and at the end the senior government official pulled me aside and asked: How do you do it? What’s that, I asked. To which he painfully says, How do you keep from having your head blow up? He’s talking about the role of facilitator in open space.

As we talk, I understand that he has absolutely no patience for people’s stories. I empathize and segue to the point: The key is to listen and to keep reminding the community about the invitation to express their wants.

Opening space is always authentic engagement. It is, as I mentioned to this government official, nothing about being defensive or quick to take power away. It’s about opening space and being non-anxious about the questions that take who-knows-how-long to love into realization.

I facilitated Open Space tonight with a room of library directors and trustees facing an uncertain future - in this case more together than apart. One participant in the closing circle remarked that the group was able to be quite productive around some very large elephants in the room because it has a history of trust transactions and collaborations.

It was also interesting seeing their ability to embrace their power within the small window of proactivity, without which the state with its history of wisdom-constraints, would take their collective fate away from them.

A great example of how a group’s capacity to open space is intrinsically linked to its history of doing so in so many small ways previously. It also helps that the convening heads of the group are clearly unwilling to take the group’s power away from them for themselves.

It’s the classic open space magic: crisis + self-empowerment + complexity + trust + open space = transformation.

So this week I facilitated community meetings in my neighborhood aimed at authentic community engagement around a housing development proposal. The context: the most demographically diverse neighborhood in the region of 4 plus million where voices polarize between support for high and low income housing.

In spite of near violence, proposal sponsor near-hijacking of the process, and participants shouting objections to giving input (the stated event intention!), the 300 plus participants - in our meager 45 minutes of time - interacted on what matters to them relative to this actually very complex situation. (The more vocal) People were livid at being asked to talk as a community about their issues and ideas instead of enjoying the usual public fare of public hearing grandstanding that we offered later that produced zero actionable content.

In Open Space where I very simply introduced and invited and held the space, we had over a dozen topics drawing genuine contributions harvesting 8 printed pages of proceedings.

It was the usual and beautiful reminder of what happens when a community is invited into a premier launch from historic victimhood to authentic engagement. Their mythic proportion resistance to their own empowerment was based on a stated preference for positional grandstanding and verbal pie-throwing against perceived persecutors. I stopped counting the number of people who remarked at the amazing and palapable difference in the energy of the community during and after Open Space … the space where no one can control anything and everyone gains everything.

At the Burning River Fest here yesterday afternoon, environmental guru David Orr, in his rousing speech suggests that, “We don’t have an environmental problem as much as a political problem.”

To which I would add that the chicken of our politics mirrors the egg of our spirituality. Authentic and sustainable transformation, from this view, then begins with spiritual transformation. Maybe this is why all of my early years’ gurus - Gandi, King, Merton, Berrigans - were all about political change grounded in spiritual change. This lesson came home again after spending a weekend earlier this year with 30 of North America’s top organizational and community change practitioners, witnessing the palpable core of spirituality that infuses the core of anything political for them.

If we want a different relationship with our environment and all the ways it does and can support our dreams, we need to, as so many aboriginal cultures have done for eons, practice an according spirituality.

When we are in touch with our ‘open nature,’ our emptiness, we exert an enormous attraction to other human beings. There is great magnetism in that state of being which has been called by Trungpa ‘authentic presence.'’ Varela leaned back and smiled. ‘Isn’t that beautiful? And if others are in that same space or entering it, they resonate with us and immediately doors are open to us. It is not strange or mystical. It is part of the natural order. / From “Synchronicity” by Joseph Jaworski, thanks to Chris Corrigan

…You have a dream — call it a vision. It has some degree of power and purity for you or you wouldn’t bother. But as long as that dream/vision is yours alone it will never be the foundation of a new viable venture. And here is the rub . As soon as that dream is shared it will change.

An excerpt from one of Harrison Owen’s posts today on the Open Space listserve.

The 2nd principle in Open Space is: Whatever happens is the only thing that could have.

This is a very curious principle. It’s the opposite of a belief that: Something else should have happened and could have happened. This is the basis of regret - criticism, blame, and judgment. None of which help us discover more options for the future.

The idea that “whatever happens is the only thing that could have” is the Buddhist observation that nothing causes itself. Everything arises interdependently, within a context of conditions that make it so. Peace of mind is understanding this. Things are as they should be given the conditions that have actually brought them about.

What’s interesting is that this understanding allows us to discover new possibilities for the future because we’re not wasting energy in regret, guilt, and other forms of attachment to a past that we cannot return to and change. It invites us to wonder what kind of future we want and to do what can make that possible. It invites us to discover the sweet spot of our power.

What is deep, authentic listening? Listening invites people to see beyond what they’ve already seen. In deep listening there is no resistance and therefore people are no longer stuck in the confines of their experience. Listening gives them freedom to explore and discover. Listening opens a space large enough for people to become transcendent.

Listening is something we all know how to do. We do not need to learn how to listen. The only thing that inhibits listening is the urge to problem solve.

As my friend June Holley said this morning, listening allows the emergence of the sparkling part of what’s real.

We tell ourselves stories about why we do what we do. Part of growing up is having better myths to explain what we are willing to take responsibility for. We spend hours spinning the yarn of myths until we come on a story that we deem credible. We are less comfortable not knowing why we or someone else does what we or they do. Even bad behavior appears more acceptable if it’s adorned with a compelling causal myth.

One of the 4 principles of the wildly successful group process called Open Space Technology is: Whatever happens is the only thing that could. The wisdom here is that life is wasted in explanations; and it is lived in the next moment’s choices. The most honest explanation for anything we do is that we did it because we could. Any more explanation is a postponement of living into a new choice in the next moment given to us. Realizing we always do what we do because we can frees us to live into new possibilities.