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Personal Collectionempty Spaces The Blog Template
Personal Collectionempty Spaces The Blog Examples

By Alyse Borkan | Jul 8, 2014

My blue chair made me love my room again. The university-appointed space was about 8×6 feet and supposed to fit my bed, a desk, my clothes, and my sanity.

I wanted to shut my bedroom door, take off my bra, my sandals, and feel so at ease that sleep could come at any point. But this room faced the courtyard of my dormitory complex — a ground floor, front-row view of the scene of my first real breakup. At night, the public safety lamp across the yard set an eerie glow, I would get periodic wafts of art school cigarettes and caffeinated psychotic chatter. By the time my mother arrived on the scene, my faith in my room had been so diminished I tended to avoid it at all costs.

We moved out the clunky dorm room desk — which was never really a desk to me anyway — and replaced it with a $42 light blue, medium-sized velvet chair from the Providence Salvation Army on Pittman street. We vacuumed the rug, placed more bins under my bed, Mom went back to New York, and I went back to studio.

When I arrived home that Sunday night and walked down our dusty hallway, I kicked off my shoes before entering my room for the first time all year. I quickly slipped in, shut the door, and was met by my charming new chair. It was a touch of my mother, some luxury, a place for guests to sit besides my bed, a soft blue place to hold court over my laundry and cardboard models.

For the rest of the semester, I adored my room and even started sleeping more. My friends loved the chair for movie watching while I fiddled around with homework assignments. It was unequivocally a much better place to have a serious conversation — or eat a bowl of ramen — than on my bed.

I refused to graduate college without my chair. It moved to my parents’ garage for a summer, and then to the East Village with three 22 year-olds to liven our first big-girl apartment. While I travel, it temporarily resides in a sunny corner of my best friend’s bedroom in Prospect Heights. She swears she’s never done it on my chair, but I would probably forgive her if she did.

It sometimes only took one new thing, or in this case a not-so-new new thing, to change everything about my room. So sit on your bed and look around: What is it you can’t stand, or what makes absolutely no sense? Get it out of there, and find something new, inviting, and exciting to put in its place.

— Simone Paasche

‘Language of Spaces’ is a methodology that helps you differentiate.

Christiane Seuhs – Schoeller is one of the Holacracy pioneers in Europe. These days she lives like a working nomad, traveling all over the world to share knowledge about the people side of the journey to self-organization.

When starting with Holacracy or any other form of self-organization most organizations face resistance. People can see how the work is organized much more clearly and effectively. But the question ‘what about the people?’ is very much alive. Holacracy makes a really clear statement about this. Holacracy is about the work. Not about the people. It’s not designed to address the people side of self-organization. This means that there is endless freedom in structuring your own norms, interpersonal relationships and other people-related affairs. Some would say that’s an opportunity, but it can be hard to start from nothing. Particularly when Holacracy simultaneously brings so much structure to the work.

Christiane and her colleagues have developed a methodology to guide the people journey when an organization steps into the world of self-organization. This tool is named the ‘Language of Spaces’.

Talking spaces

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“Let’s start by defining the spaces that we’re talking about. When it comes to the work in the organization, first there is what in the methodology is called Organizational Space. That’s where roles do operational work. Next is Governance pace. That’s where you develop the structure of the company.. Both these spaces cover the context of the organization.

We humans energize the roles of an organization and bring everything to life. We form the parallel Context of the People. This is where we live our social dynamics, our relationships, our culture in general and also our individual autonomy, needs, desires, expectations, decisions, etc. This is the space where we need to process tensions that are not organizational. What is lacking is the ability to differentiate the two contexts.. For example, we often see organizations in the adoption phase of Holacracy who have difficulty processing tensions with a personal aspect. That’s where practitioners get stuck. Although everything IS processable, in reality this is where people stop processing tensions.

In role space, during a tactical meeting for example, we learn a “language” to speak from role to role. It’s a dynamic that is comparable to grammar. In a governance meeting, when talking about the organization structure, we use a very well-defined language that includes words like “valid or invalid objection” and the process will make sure that no personal tensions are processed – yet another “language”.. In both these spaces you can avoid using names entirely. It’s simply not about the people.”

An example in role space is: ‘From my Marketing role I would like input from Product Owner about the product XYZ so I can write a product description for our website.’

When we talk from colleague to colleague we do use names and the energy changes completely. The same goes for myself on an individual level. When I talk to myself for example when reflecting inwardly. With this methodology we created a language to support that.”

“In most cases when I coach with Language of Spaces, after differentiating the organizational part of the tension, the personal aspects show up very clearly and fairly small and can be resolved right away in one session. It is a requirement of the practice to define at least one next workable step in each space in order to resolve the tension. That way, after going through the practice you will not only know what to do organizationally, but also how to move forward to resolve the personal aspects of your tension.”

The people journey

Personal Collectionempty Spaces The Blog Examples

“When someone says “Holacracy is impersonal”, that is not criticism but actually a very accurate description. Holacracy may trigger a personal development process, but that is a by-product, not the goal.”

“Language of Spaces creates a meta-frame. Besides mastering the differentiation of the personal and the organizational, it will also support you in identifying both, horizontal and vertical learning areas. This can lead you to improve your skills, such as Personal Productivity (e.g. Getting Things Done) or how to master the challenges of working remotely – just to name two of many aspects that are important for self-organization. And when it comes to vertical learning in the people context it’s about personal growth, purpose, and inner leadership.”

Working with Language of Spaces

“I would highly recommend starting to learn the Language of Spaces together with Holacracy. Because having a better understanding of the differentiation between the people context and the organization context enables you to deal with frustration and tension more effectively.”

Defining Culture

“Besides Individual Tension Coaching, the Language of Spaces also offers “Culture Awareness Process”. Through processing tensions in the people context patterns of the collective show up. It surfaces what’s going on and makes it explicit. Through these reflections and patterns in group processes a culture is defined.

Language of Spaces creates a meta-frame. When we talk about horizontal learning in the people context; we have skill training and for example the G