What´s Open Space?

Let me tell you what it does. Just imagine 500 people from a major institution decided that their institution was in serious trouble. And everybody was sure that they knew the right way on how to get out of that mess, but that meant there were 500 different opinions. So 500 people, all of whom in large part disagreed with each other, met at 9 o´clock in the morning and in about 15 minutes we introduced to open space. Imagine 500 people sitting in a very large circle, that is strange in itself. Anyway, within 15 minutes they were ready to get to work and an hour and a half after we had started they had created something like 120 different task forces and work groups, which they then ran for themselfes for the next two days.

One of the things you might want to know is, that I was the facilitator for this event. As soon as these 500 people went to work I went to take a nap. And at no time during the course did I intervene in any group in any way. When conflict broke out as it did quite often it turned out to be a way in which real differnce was surfaced and then also people found a way to bring it together. There also was absolutely no prior designation of leadership. When we started in the morning it was absolutely unclear to anybody, certainly to myself, who the leaders would going to be. But they all appeared within twenty minutes work, in which 500 people managed to create a workable agenda for themselfes, proceeded to work on it over the course of two days and then came out with major solutions on the issues they were working on.

Now, I don´t know much about you but I would say that everything in my prior training says: you simply can´t do that! We all know usually that the only way to get that done is you have to spend a lot of time with committees in front to determine what the agenda is, then you will need any number of facilitators that help the people through the hard parts and only if you are very lucky will all the pieces come together.

The beginnings

The first open space I did was in 1985, so it happened about 15 years ago: Back in 1982 I started organizing an an international symposium with about 250 people. I spent more than one year working in committees, finding the spaekers, all the things you do when you are organizing a reasonably large international congress. So we had the symposium in 1983 and everybody said they thought it was wonderfull. And then there was a „but“. And the but was they said the fun, the really good stuff always happened in the coffee breaks! And that frankly was quite a shock. So the truth was, I spent more than one year without getting payed organizing interruptions to the main event. And I said to myself: I may be dumb but not stupid, there has be a better way.

So to make a long story short not the next year but the year following I had aggreed with my friends I would host the event one more time. But what I told them was never again was I going to do what I went through the first time. The honest truth is I didn´t have a clue what it was we were going to do. The event was to take place in july of 1985 and untill a day in the middle of april I haden´t given it any thought yet what I was going to do. Starting to think it over  my mind fell on a small village in africa where I had spent some time, and what I remembered was that everything happened in a circle, everything of utility happened in a circle. Women met in a circle, the chiefs met in a circle, the village met in a circle, everybody danced in a circle, all the houses were built in a circle. And I thought, well if you can invite people to sit in a circle, we might have a start.

But just sitting in the circle is not going to be very usefull. So what would we do if we are in the circle? The next idea that came into my head was well of course a bulletin board to invite peope to post what it is what they are wanting to do or to talk about on this bulletin board. Then we have to arrange time and space and help people find together before they start to work. So finally I thought, well that´s it. If we simply invite people to sit in a circle, create a bulletin board, open the market place and get out of the way it might just work. And that, very seriously people, that´s open space. That is all there is.

Why does it work?

So the question, that has bubbled up in my mind ever since is: why does it work? Somehow we seem to think we can´t do things like that. So what is going on? I think the answer of the question „why“ is coming up very clearly now in terms of what we are learning about what is known as self-organizing systems. Most of this research was done in terms of physics and biology and things like that. And one of the major proponents is the american Stuart Coffman, an theoretical biologist and what Stuart found out is: if you have just certain, very simple preconditions organization happens. We don´t have to force it. And Stuart says it very simply: order is for free.

Now this was a very nice idea as long as you could keep it at the round of physics and biologists but it sounds like a very heretical idea if all of a sudden it invades such strange things as business, governments, schools, what ever. Because what it would be saying if it were true is that just given some certain very simple preconditions us human beings as norrowminded, egoistical, seperated as we are will naturally create effective organization. I don´t know about your history but my history says: no way! But 15 years of experience with thousends of groups all over the world says that - giving very simple preconditions and absolutely no upfront planning - the most mean, angry, conflictive group of people will get together as long they start with some common concern. And they will do this very quickly. You can watch a group of 500 People organize a high complex gathering in 20 minutes.

An Example

To give you an example: Boing Aircraft had a problem which was they had to redesign the doors on the airplane. Their problem was nobody at Boing knew how they made doors. Now, this is not that they were stupid or lazy. It was that the process of making doors is so complex that no single person knew how to do this. Not even a small group of people knew it. In fact 20.000 people all over the world in five different countries make the doors they use on the airplanes. Anyhow if this was the problem and you had to solve it you would probably do it the way Boing started out to do it. You would send out a team to benchmark what they were currently doing, you would analyse that, you would redesign that, you would issue the redisigns and then you would train the people to do it. And somewhere down the road you would have better doors. The time it would take to do that was about two and a half years. And they didn´t have that time. For a whole mess of reasons. Using open space with 400 people caring for doors - and that was the only criteria for them being there - from senior vice president down to doorhangers, the people who acutally screw the doors on the airplane, in two and a half days created what they ended up calling a strategic plan for making doors. But it was much more than just a plan to do.

So here we have a strange phenomenon. Invite any group of concerned people around  a common theme to sit down in a circle, create a bulletin board, open the market place, get out of the way and not only you highly like it, you probably achieve results quicker, faster and in many ways better than anything else. And fact is, you don´t have to run three weeks of leadership development before it starts, you don´t have to do two-day-sessions on self-managed workteams, you don´t have to go to analyst things on communication skills, it just seems to happen.

Conclusions

To jump to the end of the story. I find myself coming upon probably with a totaly outrageous conclusion. And my conclusion is that first of all what´s happening here is self-organization. And as a natural byproduct of a well functioning self-organizing system there is, guess what, the fact of leadership, self managed work-groups, respect for the individuals involved,  appreciation of diversity, all these nice things.

If that is true it would seem that many of the difficulties we are currently experiencing in organizational life are self opposed. So another possibly less popular thing is that much of what we are currently doing under the heading of management and training doesn´t need to be done. All we have got to do is to enable an environment in which people of there own free will can join together around a common course and we will get the result. My final conclusion is that there is no such thing as a non-self-organizing thing. There are only some rather deluded people who think they organize. But I recognize that isn´t very popular. And  to bring it all together: If we actually did business the way we say we do business we would be out of business!

11.2000

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