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.
