In 1863 Henry Martyn Robert was asked to lead a church meeting.
He accepted the job, but didn’t know much about presiding over formal, decision-making bodies. Later research confirmed to him that the world lack some basic, “standardized” processes for parliamentary function.
In 1876 he published Robert’s Rules of Order, which loosely adapted the United States House of Representatives’ model of governance for general, civil, “common” use.
The modern concepts of keeping minutes, making and passing “motions”, having chairpersons, etc., find elements of origin in Robert’s thesis on how good meetings ought to be executed. Many (most) of these elements of a “good meeting” are still assumed in our culture today.
I am thinking about “meetings” this week since Abe and I are running the Shared Space forum on Saturday. In the afternoon portion we are running an “open space” meeting format.
“Open Space” (or OST) meetings are kind of like a post-modern deconstruction of Robert’s meeting format. However, they are no less “formalized” than those of Robert’s design. They are highly collaborative, fluid, and focused more on networking and actionable items for the participants than on the adoption of formalized resolutions.
To make a long story short, the “open space” meeting format finds its origins in the work of Harrison Owen, who in the early 80’s started to grapple with the issues that bottleneck transformation within organizations.
One of the biggest bottlenecks was, he felt, the status quo expectation of what a “meeting” is and how it should actually accomplish its task.
Then, as now, it seems that “death by meeting” (as made famous by Patrick Lencioni’s book title) was all too typical.
Instead of just passing “decisions” (i.e. the classic, “we-hereby-conclude-that-x-should-happen”), the open space model focuses primarily on the exchange of ideas and relationship between congregants. The result is something that feels a lot more like an earnest conversation in the marketplace than a debate in the House of Representatives.
The point here is not that one kind of meeting format is intrinsically better than the other one. In fact, our event on Saturday is really a “hybrid” of several meeting/conference “types”. The point is, simply, that there are many ways of structuring formal gatherings, and it is always a good idea to research and wrestle with all the options before automatically assuming the status quo.
One thing’s for sure: when Henry Robert was asked to lead that church meeting in 1863, “meetings” as we know them would be changed forever. Even the “open space” model owes something of its existence to Robert, since Robert greatly developed the idea that every meeting should be built upon a pre-existing structure and adopted agreement of due-process (an assumption usually prevalent among organized society from its inception).
In this sense, the whole notion of an “unconference” is pure paradox, for it is itself a structured model for conferring among individuals. (You can’t “unorganize” an “organized” meeting!) Herein lies the lesson for us “postmodernists” (for lack of a better label) who often react against formalized process: there is no such thing as an intentional gathering of people that does not have inherent structure.
The question which needs to be asked is not, “How do we abandon the bottleneck of formalized structure?” but rather, “How do we redevelop the structure of meetings to serve the immediate needs we must address here and now?”
That is the question.
Filed under: Leadership by James Shelley | Tags: business > culture > productivity > reading > reading-planet > religion
Comment »
