Contrarian: Harrison Owen
Self-organizing meetings are more effective, but they hinge on trust.
You'll find context for this post, which is part of a short series, here.
I've had the great fortune of meeting some of my Contrarians in person. In Harrison Owen's case, I took a workshop he gave in the summer of 1992 to learn Open Space, the facilitation method he invented.
One of the things that really struck me in his training was how many small things he would do to create trust in the meeting right at its start — even beforehand, in the wording of the invitation. His job was to create enough trust to allow the ball to start rolling, so to speak.
A small thing he did was to continually tidy the place and make sure participants were comfortable as they arrived; another was to pace the inside of the oval he preferred for seating as he described the process. By quietly bounding the central space, he made it special.
Once he had explained the process, and participants started grabbing markers and papers to write down their topic ideas in the middle of the circle, and the schedule wall started to fill up with those ideas, he was no longer necessary to the process. He would often go take a nap, letting the group take over.
I loved how much his process trusts the participants, as well as how that gesture of trust messes with people's minds. We're all so accustomed to highly produced events where someone else set the topics, chose the formats, invited the speakers (gotta have some celebrities to draw the crowd!) and ran the show, leaving little openings for Q&A, that the freedom to be the event both frightens and liberates participants.
As a Contrarian, Owen must be bearing heresies. Here's my description of Harrison's heresies from my U22 talk:
Next up: Contrarian Hans Monderman.
As you'll see in this short series, Contrarians are masters of rethinking constraints. They are also the foundations of Design from Trust.
If you read this far, a treat: In my online Brain, you'll find all my Contrarians here, where you can see them in their greater context.
This article is cross-posted on Substack here, Medium here and LinkedIn here. It's also here in my Brain.