Harrison Owen > Quotes

“As people think and work together, a fabric of shared meaning comes into being.”
― Harrison Owen, The Power of Spirit: How Organizations Transform

“Leadership … is a collective and constantly redistributed function, and not the private property of the few or The One.”
― Harrison Owen

“The world is full of good ideas, but without passionate commitment, they are worth little and go nowhere.”
― Harrison H. Owen, Open Space Technology: A User's Guider

“For good conversation you only need one other person who shares your passion and cares about what you care about.”
― Harrison H. Owen, Open Space Technology: A User's Guider

“Open some space, and Spirit will certainly show up. Allow the magic of self-organization to work for you, and the complex adaptive system that we are will find its own power.”
― Harrison Owen, The Power of Spirit: How Organizations Transform

“If at the end of our time together you find yourself walking out with just what you walked in with, you will have wasted your time.”
― Harrison H. Owen, Open Space Technology: A User's Guider

“It is only in the dance between chaos and order that life progresses.”
― Harrison Owen, Power of Spirit

“groups of people gathered around an issue for which they care deeply will find the way–provided they had the (safe) space in which to explore.”
― Harrison H. Owen, Open Space Technology: A User's Guider

“If everything turned out just the way everybody expected, life would be exceedingly dull, and learning in any useful sense simply would not occur.”
― Harrison H. Owen, Open Space Technology: A User's Guider

“…most of the ways in which we know how to engineer change…are not effective. Given a…logical problem to solve, we are superb… But…the fundamental premises are different, which means that our logic is without power.”
― Harrison Owen, The Power of Spirit: How Organizations Transform

“Most people don’t really care about the process of a meeting; they care about the issues and the results.”
― Harrison H. Owen, Open Space Technology: A User's Guider

“it is not how many people come, or even who comes (in the sense of status or position) that counts, rather it is the quality of the interaction and conversation that make the difference.”
― Harrison H. Owen, Open Space Technology: A User's Guider

“… don't we all know that good work is rarely performed by people who don't care to do it?”
― Harrison Owen, Power of Spirit

“passionless good ideas are not only useless, they are a liability.”
― Harrison H. Owen, Open Space Technology: A User's Guider

“It would seem that most everything we do in the name of organizational effectiveness is antithetical to what Life requires”
― Harrison Owen

“Up until now, some of us actually thought that we created and organized the systems in which we work. But should it turn out that natural system…are truly self-organizing, much of that effort was wasted.”
― Harrison Owen, The Power of Spirit: How Organizations Transform

“It is the dance between chaos and order that is truly creative.”
― Harrison Owen, Power of Spirit

“Forget about trusting the process; trust the people.”
― Harrison Owen

“The job of the facilitator is not to keep things on time, but rather to enable the creation of safe time.”
― Harrison H. Owen, Open Space Technology: A User's Guider