Stories of Transformation through Contemplative Practice:
Harrison Owen of the Organizational Transformation Network

I was in Serbia a couple of months ago and we did an open space for nine villages and towns in Western Serbia, all of whom, if they were going to survive meaningfully, were going to have to work together. None of them really thought that was a good idea, and furthermore had about 1,000 years of history saying that each town was worse than the other town and my town is better than any town, and, you know... I'm not quite clear how they were all invited, and why it was they all accepted, but anyhow we ended up with 150 representatives of all these folks.

And just to make it more interesting, of course, Serbia had existed under Marxist domination or dictatorship for 60 years and then they had 10 years of Milosevic. So the general expectations from the part of a lot of people was simply that these folks are probably not going to do anything too unique and useful unless we teach them a lot and lecture to them, and they're certainly not going to engage each other in any sort of way that would be fruitful for downstream development.

Well, that was 100% wrong. We folks sat in a circle and checked each other out in open space, and from the moment that space was open until the moment it closed two and a half days later, there was a level of engagement and collective practice that was just electric, and it's going to be a while before anybody really understands what the downstream impact was, but one thing is really different - these folks now know that they don't have to be strangers. Not because somebody came out and introduced them, but because they had the experience of engaging each other in useful ways, and that's pretty common, I mean; well, no, that's not pretty common; it's kind of standard operating procedure.