Out beyond the ideas of right doing and wrongdoing is a field. I will meet you there.
Rumi

November 25, 2003
Hebron

I am practicing peace in the West Bank.

Israeli soldiers circulated on the streets of Hebron today requesting IDs of young to middle-age Palestinian men. This is business as usual. At about noon, they had 21 Palestinians in civilian clothes standing up against the wall for over an hour while they researched their IDs.

They told us they were looking for terrorists.

I grieved, imagining myself in the shoes of people on both sides. The soldiers, in addition to feeling their own safety threatened, fear for their families who live on edge anticipating the horror of the next suicide bomber. The Palestinians, most of whom are innocent, live in a humiliating captivity, and are subject to terrible violence as well.

Eventually, the Israeli soldiers motioned the Palestinian men, one by one, to collect their IDs and be on their way. Two Palestinians remained. Soldiers handcuffed and blindfolded them, and then loaded them into the back of their jeep and took them away.

An elderly Palestinian man, like many others passing by, stopped to observe. His sadness was evident when he said to me. “We’re stuck. Our problem is going on and on. It is not good for the Palestinians, nor is it good for the Israelis. I grew up here in Hebron hearing my grandfather tell and retell the story of receiving 27 gifts from different Jewish Israeli friends when he married. It has not always been the way it is now.”

Together, we stood there holding the space for peace. There was no anger, just longing for the possibility of reconciliation. His story captured my imagination. “That is the prize,” I thought to myself. “May we stay focused on the prize - nurturing respectful coexistence - and not grow weary in the process.”

I am here with CPT (www.cpt.org), supporting the long-term team of peacekeepers. In addition, I am re-connecting and learning from friends native to this region, who, like me, use the Open Space method with groups to cultivate peace and self-determination.

Peace starts with each one of us. May we hold space for peace, longing for reconciliation, imagining and staying focused on the prize of nurturing respectful co-existence.

Website: theexperiment.info
Our collectively created wiki website: eksperyansla.info
John Engle: john@theexperiment.info

Inviting or Excluding?
Evaluating our way of being

Several months ago someone broke into the Catholic chapel in Mariaman, Haiti, the village where I live, and stole the sound system. While my immediate reaction was disappointment (who would rob a poor church?), that quickly turned to wondering whether this was in fact a disguised blessing for the congregation.

Rosias, the chapel’s director, is among my closest friends in the neighborhood. Normally, he is kind, generous, and thoughtful. But as soon as he’s in a group or playing his role as leader, he becomes domineering and excluding. I vividly recall hearing the loud speakers blasting and so peeked into the chapel one Sunday evening. To my astonishment, I discovered Rosias standing in the pulpit preaching into the microphone with just four people sitting shell-shocked just ten feet in front of him.

With a group, Rosias, like so many of us, releases the restraining bridle on his ego. We become so wrapped up in our own ideas that we are totally unaware of how we are excluding those around us. Far too often, a person in authority dominates group conversation, while fixing his gaze on just one or two people, which often means choosing to never lay eyes on those from a lower socio-economic class who are in the group. (I always cringe when I’m singled out in such meetings as one of the chosen few.)

Too often Haitians who hold power in one form or another—whether politicians, business elite, community and organizational leaders, pastors, priests, or teachers—are audaciously egocentric. It’s as though they have been issued a license to talk and not listen, command and not serve, exclude and not invite. There seems to be a direct correlation between holding power and having exclusionary tendencies. (And certainly this phenomenon is not limited to Haiti!)

Much of my work in Haiti and the U.S. involves creating space for others to express, decide, brainstorm, and act—in an effort to transcend people’s tendencies to fill up the space with themselves and exclude others. Sincere, active listening is the key to creating such space.

I use a method called Open Space Technology, which enables ideas to emerge from the group (not just the leaders) that gives each person responsibility, and that empowers people’s passion for change. For ten years I’ve been practicing this method with groups ranging from leadership teams with large institutions to boys living on the streets of Port au Prince.

Open Space often requires significant preparation work with the group’s leaders, who must be willing to “invite” their people—staff/board members, employees, members of a community/association/congregation—into the decision-making process. This goes against the leadership style we are most familiar with.

Since its creation in 1983, Open Space has helped leaders become inviting rather than excluding—which has resulted in surprising and extraordinary developments. Creativity, motivation, and energy that were otherwise untapped emerge among group members.

This past August, I participated in an international gathering of Open Space practitioners in Fyn, Denmark. Certain aspects of my experience have left me feeling a little discouraged as an active member of this network. While spending three days with colleagues from around the world nourished and inspired me, I was surprised by the way in which many long-timers frequently occupied group space by talking and dominating, instead of creating space or opportunity for newcomers to share. For me, learning to be inviting rather than excluding is a life-long apprenticeship. In group interactions, it’s not easy to harness my ego’s hungry appetite to impress others and to never miss an opportunity to tell people about me.

I dream of the day when it is culturally taboo to be excluding, when people will be so concerned about treating others with dignity and respect that we will avoid allowing power, prestige, money, etc., to concentrate around us for fear that it will obstruct our ability to be inviting. I dream we will become so effective at inviting and sharing what we have, and at including and caring for others, that the alluring shine of power and wealth loses its luster.

I hope to walk by on the path near my home in Haiti, where I’ll look into the chapel to find Rosias and members of his congregation sitting in a circle and engaged in respectful, enlightening dialogue.


John Engle is co-founder of Beyond Borders and The Experiment in Alternative Leadership. He leads groups with Open Space Technology both in Haiti and the U.S., and is on the board of Open Space Institute U.S.A. His email address is john@theexperiment.info.

Conversations have the potential for fostering deep learning, whether they are on-line or face to face, planned or unplanned. Here is a conversation taking place yesterday and today among people from around the world. And, a conversation I had with my neighbor, an 84 year old Haitian man, two weeks ago, influenced my reflections here.

To my colleagues on the Open Space list serve,

When it come to dealing with the interesting question: Why does Open Space Work? -- I have found the emerging theory and practice surrounding Self organization to be very helpful. Not the only help to be sure, but definitely on the short list. I also confess to a degree of frustration -- that to the moment, few in the larger scientific community have taken any notice or interest in Open Space. I think this is a lose/lose situation. We lose because their insights and questions might reveal aspects of Open Space that we have failed to notice. And I think they lose because, from where I sit, Open Space is a wonderful natural experiment over time and in the present. Over time, we have probably some 20,000 iterations of the "experiment" from which to learn. Since most of us were more interested in the practical results than "doing science" detailed accounts are hard to come by. but we do have a network, and it does have a memory. And what we may have lost as a matter of historical record can be replicated any time someone chooses to open space.

Anyhow, it may happen that the Plexus Institute becomes a useful intermediary. Those of you who were in OZ for OSONOS will remember Henri Lipmanowicz who is chairman of the Institute and came to OZ to find out about Open Space. The mission of the Institute is to discover and foster the application of principles of self-organization to the real world of human systems, particularly health care systems. Since OZ, Henri and I have had a number of conversations, and I attended a conference they sponsored in Austin TX -- which was most interesting and definitely neither Open Space nor self-organizing. But one thing is sure, Plexus did manage to attract substantive folks from multiple disciplines and some useful conversations have started.

My conversations with Henri will continue, and hopefully move from talk to action. Which brings me to the point (at long last) of this note. What sort of actions, questions, explorations occur to you which might be pursued with Plexus. Henri, Curt (The president) and I will be conversing next week, and I will let you know the outcome -- but if any burning, passionate issues or opportunities jump to your mind -- let me know.

Harrison Owen


dear harrison,

thank you for the invitation to share our questions. the ongoing question for me is this:

why is it that in quite a few cultures, at least those that i am familiar with, human beings are "wired" or "programmed" in a way which leads us to gravitate toward centralizing power in organizations, and for trying to take responsibility for things totally divorced from our own behavior?

perhaps i am overlooking the many examples where these tendencies don't occur. just seems that so often that this is the case. for example, i could be working with groups of street boys and older boys insisting that younger ones work with me while they themselves don't, or literacy teachers who will invest a full day discussing what the government should do about literacy, when there is no evidence to suggest that their suggestions will even be considered...or, a group of leaders in an NGO (nongovernmental organization) who are trying to dictate the services that unpaid volunteers give to the organization...the list could go on and on.

my question is, where does this come from and why is it so difficult for us to see the folly in it? ...at least folly for the well intentioned people. its totally understandable that people who want to dominate and exploit would behave in this manner. but we all watch, wonderful people with good intentions (including ourselves) frequently gravitate toward centralizing power in organizations and trying to take responsibility for things divorced from our own behavior. seems that these things clog up a fluid and life-giving self-organizing process.

john engle

Mark Jones (mark_r_jones@att.net) writes:

Hi.

Perhaps we are not so much "wired" as "conditioned" to seek and/or establish centralized power in organizations.

And perhaps we have such a paucity of current "collective" experience with self-organizing systems within our daily lives, that we don't know what to choose otherwise.

Stella Humphries directed my attention to an exploration that I believe has profound practicality. Bernard Lietaer has been promoting a key concept of self-organization -- Sustainability. He has written a book on the concept.

I offer Stella's gift to this community:

"The Future of Money -- Creating New Wealth, Work, and a Wiser World"
...

Mark

Dear John,

I'm wondering many of the same thing now too... I see ridiculous things happening around me all the time as the leadership in aboriginal communities takes disastrously wrong turns from time to time. At the moment there is stuff happening in the urban Aboriginal community in Vancouver which turns my stomach.

There are a number of reasons for this I think, at least in our case. There is the legacy of colonialism which has destroyed much of the traditional leadership systems that "wire" us for leading in a different way. There is the very deep acculturation of the residential school model, an echo of the process that saw thousands of children taken from their communities and forced into adopting western culture for the better part of 120 years. That multi-generational legacy has left us with a leadership model that is expert and power
centered.

There are also the role models we have around us, and the news about Enron and WorldCom, our political systems, the forms of governance forced upon us by the governments that endorse our non-profits, not to mention movies and TV and other media all of which extol the virtues of power and imply that the way to get it (and the money and "freedom" that comes with it) is to consolidate control.

There is also this persistent notion that "freedom" equals "control" and that to get more of the first, you need more of the second.

It all makes for an upstream swim for people looking for other ways to lead.

There is some good news though, at least around these parts (and good news in Haiti too, John, if your work is any indication).

I have just this week been informed by our regional vice-chief for the Assembly of First Nations that we (meaning me and my OST co-conspirator Chris Robertson) have been invited to convene a three day conference this fall for people we call "emerging leaders" in our community. We will be inviting something like 150 Aboriginal leaders from around British Columbia to come together, meet one another and talk about how to address the leadership challenges of the next 20 years. What sets these folks apart is that they
are not command and control leaders. Most of them are not even in what we would call leadership positions in their organizations and communities. But they do somehow catalyze change, they work hard to overcome the very dynamics that you are talking about John, and they bring in fresh thinking and new ideas to their work. And they also don’t know that there are others like them out there, because they all operate below the radar (and you can see why). It is our objective to bring these people together, in Open Space of course, to have them find each other and seed a revolution in leadership somehow. Lofty sentiments perhaps, but better than doing nothing.

Another thing that is going on is that a group of very active Aboriginal youth have approach Chris and I to train them in Open Space so that they can convene Open Space youth forums alongside the quarterly meetings of the First Nations Summit, a gathering of Nations involved in treaty negotiations who meet four times a year. The youth think that the Summit could be more effective, and in fact it is their dream to run these parallel youth sessions in Open Space for awhile, but then to have the Summit itself meet in Open Space, which would be really interesting, let me tell you.

So we're going to do the two day workshop with them.

There is more really interesting stuff happening with some First Nations that are looking at reviving their traditional leadership processes and marrying them with Open Space Technology. I'll let you, and the list, know more in a few weeks.

But in short, I think that one answer is to find those leaders that are working quietly against this hardwired approach and put them in Open Space together, and see what they come up with. For me, I have to spend my time and energy wisely, and that means not trying to rehabilitate the folks that are tearing apart our community (as they are doing now) but rather supporting those that need to be there to pick up the pieces and rebuild in a different way. The tyrants (some of them are) that are doing damage are, in the long run, providing us with an opportunity to change the world.

I think so anyway.

Chris Corrigan
Vancouver, Canada

Dear Mark,

your words make good sense. they make me think of a multi-generational group discussion in our neighborhood last week.

we were studying a text translated into haitian creole from rene descarte's "discourse on the method." the grandpa (84) in the group remarked that he did not totally agree with descarte's words regarding how people generally simply imitate one another, how we are conditioned to do this and that we lack rigorous habits of challenging one another's thinking.

"if this is the case, why is it that each generation brings new changes to society. when i was growing up, it would have been inconceivable for grown-ups to sit in a circle with children, like we're doing today, discussing issues like this. thus, societal change occurs because people are open to new ideas and to challenging present thinking."

profound wisdom can emerge even when its not expected, when we listen.

yes, conditioning is most likely the explanation. and, the good news is, that even though we are conditioned, change happens. its just that sometimes it doesn't happen near as quickly as i want it to. :)

john engle


Dear Harrison

For me, the key to self organisation is the inclusion and participation of equals.

Systems fail when structure dominates form, concentrating decision making in fewer and fewer hands. Organisations are, for the most part, still pyramids based on the myth of the strong leader.

System distortion flows from unbalanced decision-making that excludes people, especially the public, and relies heavily on experts (specialists who know a narrow field well enough to repeat the same mistakes).

Plexus should start their investigation with the evolution of decision making and the exclusion of stakeholders, then the Institute will start understanding large group processes, participatory democracy, equality and open space.

As Theodore Zeldin (An Intimate History of Humanity, 1994) said: "Conversation demands equality between participants. Indeed, it is one of the most important ways of establishing equality. Its enemies are rhetoric, disputation, jargon and private language, or despair at not being listened to and not being understood."

Cheers

Kerry
Open Futures
Edinburgh