These are emerging guiding principles that we have seen help open systems. These began to be co-created in 2019 at our first open system convening, then iterated again during the 2020 COVID pandemic, and then through the helpful hand of our residents and practice in the field. In the spirit of open system work, these are under constant revision, given constant learning and perspective.  We'd love to have your feedback and thoughts on them, especially as they evolve over time - we look to others to see our blindspots as they help us open our system as well. 

We present this work as a spiraled, both linear and non-linear trajectory that we believe is critical for maximum potential for change. In every open system project or strategy we see elements of each, but opportunities to be leveraged more fully.

The first phase “Prepare” is about readiness and awareness, building individual and community potential for change. The second phase is “Provoke” and is the tactical disruption of the closed system but breaking through the structures and then modeling new democratic potential for participation. The third phase is “Propel” which creates the potential for the open system disruption to be magnified and sustained beyond the initial moment.

Principle 1: 

Activate Open Leadership

Openers hold mindsets and beliefs that allow for the potential for community and democratic change.

Practices:

  • Energizing Purpose, Passion, Place

    • Openers generate sustained open systems when they build energy between their professional work (purpose), flowing into their work (passion), in a community they deeply care about (place).

  • Democratic Leadership

    • Openers resist traditional authoritarian leadership practices and build an inclusive, pragmatic and sense of possibility through their work.

  • Open Hearts/Minds/Paths

    • Openers must be prepared to open the deepest parts of themselves - their minds, their hearts, and their paths in order to press themselves and others to maintain openness to challenging narratives and ideas. (Inspired by Theory U)

  • Liberatory Leadership

    • Openers must consistently be primed to interrogate their own biases and assumptions, observe the intersectional ~isms in their context, and create space for others to do the same. 

Principle 2: 

Know Your Community

Openers seek to reimagine the traditional understanding of their community, who is in their space, and where there is democratic alignment for co-creation.

Practices:

  • Redefining Community

    • Openers must embrace the dynamism and complexity of communities to build adaptive, responsive open systems.

  • Mapping Closed & Open Ecosystems

    • Openers must get real about the closed or open structures within and outside their institutions or organizations.

  • Identifying Your Open Moment

    • Openers identify opportunities for cracking open the system when the executive, governance and community align in their aims and capacity. 

Principle 3:

Design Breakthrough Spaces

Openers create and build spaces of clarity and construct inclusively democratic to disrupt closed systems with strategic cadences to gather maximum impact.

Practices:

  • Radical Clarity

    • To fully break open closed systems, Openers must be exceptionally clear about the parameters of the space they are seeking to hold.  

  • Inclusive Democracy

    • To achieve significant breakthroughs, Openers must build responsive democratic spaces that inclusive represent community voices.

  • Cadence for Maximum Impact

    • Openers designing a process for maximum impact means must build a cadence and momentum that amplifies your open moment. 

  • Breaking Addiction to Closed Systems

    • As Openers are designing for your breakthrough space, they will need to consider how they will attend to the closed system mindsets and addiction to current ways of working that are  present in the system. 

Principle 4: 

Model Creative Democracy

As Openers disrupt closed systems, they must generate reciprocal energy for co-creation, sharing new and creative ways of working and making decisions, to reignite democracy.

Practices

  • Establish Shared Reality

    • Openers must create an understanding of reality and the problem, sharing and individual perspectives, and this conception of the problem must be held by all the members of the team. 

  • Co-Creation & Reciprocity

    • Openers have the opportunity to co-create in ways that honor the diverse expertise of the team, but must take care to establish reciprocal loops for information and products so that all members can lend their gifts to the work. 

  • Repair Ruptures

    • Openers know that ruptures in the group will occur and that they are tremendous opportunities to model and experience new ways to healing trauma in a community.

  • Consensus Decision-Making

    • Openers find that creative expressions of democracy, such as consensus approaches, may build stronger commitment and ownership of the path forward. 

  • Experiencing Communitas

    • Openers must take time and care to name the hallmarks of the community experience and celebrate both the outcome and the feeling of doing the work in a more democratic way - a feeling we call “communitas”. 

Principle 5:

Assemble Abundance Partnerships

Openers can leverage new ways of approaching partnership to sustain openness and achieve higher order goals that individuals cannot achieve alone.

Practices

  • Seeking Higher Order Impact

    • Openers can expand into opportunities for broader impact, which require new partners, teams, and stakeholders to create impact they each could not achieve alone.

  • Short-Circuit Scarcity with Clarity

    • As new partnerships emerge they will face numerous scarcity issues that will sabotage the efforts unless addressed directly early and often. 

  • Manage Co-Contamination

    • All stakeholders have distinct agendas that can create fear and concern from others that must be managed to sustain the partnership. 

Principle 6:

Expand Openness

Openers see their role as create more opportunities for openness to expand inside and outside the system for long-term change.

Practices

  • Sustain Co-Production

    • Openers should attend to maintaining reciprocal relationships with the community through the process of implementation of the initiative. 

    • Translocal Adaptation

    • Openers should resist efforts to scale and replicate, instead focusing on local connections and adaptation models to bring innovation openness to other locations.

    • Identifying & Integrating Slipstreams

    • As new opportunities for openness emerge, Openers must cultivate them and weave seemingly disparate initiatives together. 

    • Lifting Up Other Openers

    • Openers have a responsibility for elevating the visibility of leaders within their own and partner organizations who are doing work aligned to open principles. 

    • Open Narratives

    • Openness expands in systems when leaders tell intentional stories about initiatives that exemplify open principles.