open space at head of 21 methods that 21st C organisations value most - overlongX3

[chris macrae]

Well, I'd be happy if it were so ; and as a result may have given fellow
knowledge management europeans an overlong dose, which also had to be
cut in parts because the particular virtual community cant cope with
more than 2000 chars per post

If you'd like to add some comments, the following 6000 chars are at
http://www.knowledgeboard.com/cgi-bin/item.cgi?id=132092&d=1&h=417&f=56&
dateformat=%o%20%B%20%Y

Part 4
Through deep experience, Harrison's Owen's model of innovation and
transformation matures around helping people of all levels to face up to
crises of trust together.

If we are to sustainably reconcile any situation where human conflict
has depressingly reigned, we must enable people to recover communal
awareness. Begin by regaining respect for each other as human beings
however much history prior to the opening of space compounded hatreds or
ideological differences. Moreover, history's particular Conflict usually
has a root cause in a community/organisation when something changed in
the environment. Picture a system that previously involved perfect
management controls, having in some way broken down, and leadership
Confusion of what u-turn is actually now essential. Then failure to
wholly address change just-in-time. Then quarter after quarter, the
system compounds further errors, and attracts a perfect storm of change
forces. Then people feel life is Chaos; lose confidence in self and
others; with hope lost, all the warring emotions may unleash within the
organisation's body politic. So the only reconciliation possible
requires renewal of the deepest respect between people and asking them
to collectively dare discover freedom to self-organise rather than be
subjected to more control of the uncontrollable. This simultaneous
conflict busting is achieved by having the quality time and space to
engage mutually in inquiring what possible solutions can 'we'
collectively discover and begin practising anew. Innovation, writ large
and reborn systemically!

Is there more to understanding the practice and consequences of Open
Space than we have just described? Well, yes a quarter of century's
schooling which now encompasses over 50000 cases, many involving the
biggest organisational challenges groups of people have ever joined
together to try to resolve . The meetings have involved any number of
participants from 5 to 5000. They have been conducted in 80 countries,
so the system's spirit is proven as trans-cultural. Experienced
facilitators of open space form an alumni group around Harrison where
experiences have been openly written up and shared. So if you want a
method that innovates or maximises the social networks around each
person as well as the communal context restoration to health and
celebration of human spirit, Open Space is the simplest benchmark
against which any other self-organising method's design can be evaluated
for impact of contextual integrity and on compounding dynamics of a
human relationship system. Lastly, there is a consequent conversion for
those who have had the good fortune to participate in one truly convened
open space. Should you be responsible for hosting meetings which are
intended to make the most of everyone's contribution, you will find that
the way you decide to help meetings flow will always be different from
that time when you cease to be an open space virgin.



Open Space Part 3

Formally, the only organisational control which people agree to whilst
relating to each other in open space is "The Law of 2 Feet". If you're
in a meeting where the conversation around you is causing you to feel
negative emotions, quietly go somewhere else. That way you won't waste
your own energy or dilute that of others, and reciprocally if it happens
that some people conduct meetings in very one-sided ways, it is likely
that during open space they will soon find themselves soliloquising on
their own, which in turn leads such people to start adapting their
communication manners. Apart from its one guiding rule, open space does
assume and stage certain contextual conditions:
. Before an open space is the invitation- one overarching reason for
coming to the event some of the richest open spaces literally involve a
challenge where people may be coming from opposing sides of a deep
conflict.
. People begin the meeting in a circle, being the layout where every can
see each other as an equal spirit (a cultural coda that indigenous
cultures and Quakers have authenticated over centuries).
. A round of brief (usually less than 60 second) introductions are made
where typically each person explains one main reason why there were
motivated to come- and spend up to three days - to discuss the issue at
hand.
. From then on, a market is made of what topics people want to discuss
and thus the participants from a timetable of sessions and each person
chooses which discussions to attend.
Discussion markets then iterate through most of the time devoted to open
space. Because such meetings drain a lot of attentive and interpersonal
energies, they should be sandwiched with refreshing experiences - the
chance to go for a walk and soak up some breathtaking scenery, some
picnic-like conviviality with food, some tribal dancing if you will
forgive a Scot's idea of bonhomie, or indeed any other manifestation of
diverse group culture. Why not re-energise every human being's
performance with as much good humour, as well as serious focus, that
truly inspired participants can co-create.

Another aspect of the patterning of open space is that all the
content-convened meetings will be simply documented with a clear title,
main points of discussion and action conclusions if any, a list of who
attended. Before an open space closes everyone receives this
documentation and contact points among all participants are shared so
that networking can continue and where action projects have emerged from
the meetings these can continue from that day on.

So what does open space achieve in its entirety? It gives optimal, as
well as diverse and continuing, opportunities for people to form
networks. It plants the greatest collective possibility for human
interactions to resolve a challenge, to pass together through a conflict
barrier.


Open Space part 2

An uppermost issue is that any transformation of organisational
leadership does not need to be complex, but it does need to relentlessly
pose a conflict with what was perceived to be so precise about the
traditional powers of strategy, measurement and mastering
administration. Specifically, neither classic strategic bibles typified
by Michael Porter's research from 1975-1985 nor what was the 20th
century tangible accounting monopoly of auditing measures were concerned
to help people make the most of their skills within a humanly systemic
focus, instead of merely machines making the most use of people.
Separation and transaction and standard, not interaction, relationships
and deep compounding context were embodied in the old organisational
design and power over people as productive agents.
As the 1980s progressed, so did value multiplying paradigms for
organising human relationship systems advanced through parallel schools
(eg organisational learning, intrepreneur systems, , etc). Furthermore,
organisational architects from Drucker downwards were arguing that
service, globalization and knowledge networking economies would demand a
(post-industrial) revolution in leadership beyond mere the command and
control culture of the machine age organisation. Theoretically, systemic
change in how to produce value was laid out in 1990's strategic frames
(eg Kay, Hamel & Prahalad, Collins & Porras) together with interacting
organisational designs (eg Wheatley's self-organising, Hock's Chaordic,
Biological web frames of Sahtouris and others, Open Source Models,
Kelly's model of Economic Democracy, Tapscott's Transparency, Harding's
Model of National Comparisons in Sector Productivities, Allee's Value
Exchange) outdated Porter's Strategic volumes of the 1980s.

To know Open Space's spiritual culture, explore Harrison's earlier
career background. Missionary in the Peace Corps in Africa; Anglican
priest...Then one day he found himself in a field surrounded by black
people who were about to be charged on by police. This was the era when
the American Civil rights movement was transforming that nation's
society. As a tall lanky young man, he remembers feeling deep fear until
a seven year old black girl came up to him and said 'mister will you
hold my hand'. That moment changed Harrison's life. He soon gave up his
career in the priesthood, a change which also had dramatic effects on
his family, several of whom could not understand this new direction. His
new career devotion was towards helping facilitate organisational
systems where people had the opportunity to commune with deep respect
for each other. In turn, this explains why his passionate inquiry into
practices of Organisational Transformation evolved to the stage that he
had started to coolly master in the 1980s.

Open Space -part 1
Chris Macrae
 Open Space Technology. This methodology, originated in the early 1980s,
can help to connect to personal networking , innovation and communal
spirit. Big enough news?... well not quite. We like to prepare the stage
with a parable about the right stuff of confronting a conflict barrier.

Going supersonic: Earlier aviators literally lost all as they crashed
trying to pass through the speed of sound, until one dared try out his
hypothesis; as he flew through the barrier he needed to turn the cockpit
controls the other way round. (Almost all organisational systems need to
turn at least one perfect command and control wholly around to pass
through conflict barriers or paradigm shifts such as virtual networks.
This suggests top people and most of all their professional advisers
need a certain modesty about historical top-down precision if the future
they are leading to in networked markets is to be worthwhile. Sadly this
hasnt yet occurred when it comes to global accounting's mathematically
wrong valuation of intangibles and trust-flows. The measurement monopoly
-and all who fawn to them - have aborted the knowledge working age for
so long that the world is saying ouch from almost every local economy
and society.)

Let us now return to ground. Open Space's birth came about in the early
1980s when Harrison Owen was the host of the annual conference of
Organisation Transformation experts. In spite of his best efforts,
feedback from the first two conferences showed that delegates preferred
the networking time over coffee, to the main sessions where expert
podium speakers talked and the audience listened. Harrison decided to
design the 3rd Organisational Transformation conference as a time and
space which maximised everyone's opportunity to network.

The design rules for how people interact communally in open space are
the simplest for self-organising

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