Author: Tenneson Woolf

Returning now from co-hosting The Art of Humans Being at the Essex Conference Center and Retreat in Essex, Massachusetts. The subtitle or particular focus of this one was “Explorations in the New Economy.”

I loved working with this team. I learned a lot. I experience with Ria Baeck a calm and clear presence. She has a different relationship to time that seems more grounded. She has deep insights. Susan McHenry was the core caller on this team. She puts her heart fully into everything. It was her conviction and support for this event that was a big part of my saying yes. I learn something important with Judy Wallace each time I’m with her. She has a firm commitment to hearing more, listening longer, and welcoming the sacred. Teresa Posakony and I journey through much together. Our work. Our life. She has a way of bringing play, focus, insight, and direction together. And Essex, the retreat center on Cape Ann is really a spectacular place to hold a group of people in meeting together.

This is the second time that I have co-hosted under this title, a format that Judy and I were part of creating two years ago. It was a different kind of design experience, one that was more emergent. We would host a circle in the morning and then work with what we felt compelled to offer. I particularly liked hosting a money and currency game from that pace of emergence and improv.

The Art of Humans Being format borrows from the traditions of the Art of Hosting, Women Moving the Edge, and the School for Collective Leadership. I love holding as purpose in this format the attention to re-presencing, re-patterning, and re-storying. I love it that we give primary attention to our human beingness so that that can help in the domain of new economies. Lots that I suspect will stay with me.

Ria is putting together a harvest document. I few things that I have to offer to that are here:
– A Wordle image from the circle, “I am living the new story.”
– A video on YouTube from the money game we played (1 minute)
– Photos of flipcharts on Flickr
–Photos of people and place on Flickr
–Audio file of reflective learning from the Essex Currency Game (thanks Carla for recording)

I also offered a Rap poem, Humans Being, Humans Seeing. Those lyrics are here:

Humans Being, Humans Seeing
Tenneson — July 2012

Acknowledge. Celebrate.
Initiate.

Just create something.
Move it forward, toward

Networks. Alliances.
New finances.

Show up. There’s a job.
No robbin’

Each other, humans being.
Humans seeing.

From the heart.
That’s the start.

Complexity. Beyond hexity.
Beyond trances.

Spark, spark, spark, spark.
Hark to the spark.

Isn’t this reasonable!
Clever things for the all of us.

No stall for us,
but a fall for us.

Humans being, humans seeing.
Humans being, humans seeing.

The world is crying for integrity.
Accountability.

People are saying whoa!
Citizens awakening to whoa.

And saying be reasonable
in our season of able.

Any object contemplated upon
opens a new organ of perception.

Humans being, humans seeing.
Humans being, humans seeing.

I appreciate these words, offered recently by Kerry Edinburgh on the Open Space listserve.

1. It is all about participatory democracy, because the agenda is created by participants and all the conversation is open and transparent.

This one for the reference to participative democracy, the root choice or premise for why one would want to utilize OS. Also for how it points to democratizing the agenda creation process.

2. There are no talking heads and egos cannot dominate, because of the Law of Two Feet.

Though I find ego can still be a part of OS events, it doesn’t take the same hold for the reason Kerry suggests. Freedom to move mediates the invisible grip of power.

3. There is no hierarchy, top table or controlling influences.

Again, I think there is some of this that shows up. However, the surrounding conditions, including the principles, help to change this dynamic if it does show up.

4. It is driven by passion (care about your burning issue) and responsibility (do something about it.)

This gets right to the heart of it. It’s a key point of the narrative that I use when people ask why to consider OS as a methodology.

5. All voices are heard, because all participants are equal.

Or, there is a better chance that the voices that want to be heard, can be heard. OS is like the difference of a megaphone used by only one and instead, giving everyone present cell phones, texting, and web access.

Thanks Kerry.

The list is building. Images. Experiences. Conversations. Insights. Questions that get me excited. Teresa and I have been in Japan now for six days. In the Kyoto and Otsu areas. Hosted well by friends Yuya and Aya, Bob and Susan. Inspired by the places I’ve been. Sooo enjoying the feeling of fresh eyes and curiosity to begin to understand the newness of this place for me. And surprised by the gift of jet lag — I’m wide awake and alert at 4:30 a.m.

Beauty — This photo is from a center of the meeting room for a Miratuku dialogue that took place on the first two days that I was here. I shared a teaching and invitation to beauty with the participants. I asked them to each name ten things that were beautiful in our meeting space. I then invited them to share that with a partner, and then some of it with the full group. Why? To invoke the energy of beauty that is already present. To honor beauty and what it does for the human spirit individually and collectively. To remember the experience of surprise when we give our attention to particular qualities. It is also my experience that Japanese culture has an attention to beauty and simplicity that is different from other cultures. This photo was taken near the end of the dialogue. I asked participants to each do one thing to help make the room beautiful. One person, Fumisan, gave particular attention to our center. Removed cluttered papers. Arranged the scarves. Added flowers and grasses from outside the meeting room. What a great thing to invite humans to be beautiful together.
Emergence — This is a model inspired by a conversation that Yuya and I had the first morning. It was one of the conversations that I feel I came to Japan for. Yuya was sharing how the deeper work he is exploring is about flow and emergence. About finding and seeing the invisible. I added a few thoughts about wholeness. This image to the right came to me as I was looking for ways to graphically bridge my ability to speak in Japanese. The inside figures are people that each have questions and insights. The arrows in the middle indicate some of the process of turning to each other. The outside green lines then show a symbol of the whole of that group with insights and questions. They may be similar to what individuals have. But the come from the interact of the group together. I loved our mutual sharing. That energy of the group is already there. It already exists. Through turning to one another, we come to see it.
Biwako — Biwa lake has been a home base for me. Aya and Yuya have welcomed us to their apartment home, four blocks from the lake. That apartment has been a home for friendship, sleeping, food, and internet. The lake has been a home early morning quiet, people watching, walking, and jogging. I’ve always appreciated, and needed, spaces outside to help feel grounded. Ah, Biwako, the largest fresh water lake in Japan, has been perfect.
Keninji — This is the oldest Zen temple in Kyoto. The people in this photo are board members from Miratuku. Yukasan, on the right, is one of Bob Stilger’s old soul friends. A fantastic translator also. On the left is Eisukesan. He is a designer, among other things. His energy is alive and fresh. He is the one that invited us to got to Keninji — because it was beautiful and inspiring. It was also somehow connected to the teachings of Kukai, a Japanese monk from around 1,200 years ago. He apparently was a person who encouraged and taught of wholeness. Eisukesan was sharing his inspiration from Kukai. The accessibility, the approachability of this place was palpable to me. There was a kind of simplicity that felt…familiar. To feel it in the Miratuku wonderings and planning was fantastic!

More to come.

From pal, Chris Corrigan, shared on the Open Space List Serve. I love this for the ooze that Chris references. And for the relationship he names between that fundamental aspect of life and the methodology we use to be part of it.

The new forms appear all around us all the time.  They bubble in and out of existence, and once in a while something takes hold and gets more and more concrete.  There is nothing particularly destined about something like democracy – it just became the experiment that got a significant boost from power and mass at the right times.  And of course it is practiced in many forms, none of which should ever be thought of as permanent.

Open Space (by which I mean the unbounded field of self organizing potential that is always around us) is the primordial ooze that provides the conditions for the birth of new structures.  The methodology we all love so much is a formal expression of this ooze, deployed for useful strategic purposes.  But it is only in the Open Space of everyday living that the real organizational forms arise and take shape.  And for every single one that becomes standard practice, there are millions that die as unrealized ideas.  Sometimes these ideas return as the time becomes right, sometimes they are lost to human memory.  

All governance is and will continue to be emergent.  We can be fooled by the planning that goes into what it takes to concretize a over nance system, but we should never forget – with great hope – the kind of dynamics that allows such systems o emerge in the first place.