Organizations today are experiencing unprecedented changes in their environment. They are facing a dramatic transition to a global economy, accelerated competition, shifts in government regulations, and nonstop technological innovations. There is a need to explore new ways of organizing that will allow companies to successfully compete and thrive in the twenty-first century. Current management literature suggest that perspectives for understanding change continue to be rooted in a machine metaphor of control and predictability that grew out of the seventeenth-century, Newtonian physics. Meeting the demands of a rapidly changing environment calls for innovative approaches to the way organizations are understood and developed. At a minimum, it involves challenging current assumptions about ways of thinking and acting towards organizations and the people in them.

Discoveries from the emerging science of complexity theory provide a new perspective for organizing and understanding change. Complexity theory claims that living systems are self-organizing and have the capacity for achieving healthy, adaptive processes essential for sustaining life. Theorists are finding that autonomy, redundancy, diversity, and learning are essential characteristics that create conditions for self-organization. These characteristics provide a new lens for looking at the nature and direction of change and offer ways of working that enable the development of sustainable work communities and the emergence of appropriate structures and processes responsive to current and future needs.

Since organizations use meetings as a primary method for connecting people to get work done, they provide us a window to see how enterprises approach change and organizing. To effectively deal with today’s challenges and organizational dilemmas there is a need to bring individuals together quickly in ways that remove the constraints of inappropriate structure and control, and provide the environment to work creatively and productively on critical tasks. Open Space Technology (OST) meetings emerged from these challenges. In 1983 Harrison Owen, an international business consultant, came to the conclusion that the most significant and valuable part of a symposium, which he had spent a year organizing, was the coffee breaks, the open spaces. He was interested in combining the synergy and excitement present in the coffee breaks with the substance and productivity to an effective meeting.

After experiencing being in an Open Space meeting at an ODN conference I saw the possibility of its effectiveness in creating the context that allows an organization to shift to a self-organizing mode at my own company Hewlett Packard Company (HP). A Regional Training Center (RTC) was willing and interested in exploring a new social technology. Management establishes most RTC meeting agendas. These agendas lack the unique interests of the participants and are not designed to be timely and flexible. In contrast, the RTC Open Space meeting focused on the "issues and opportunities for the RTC to provide superior customer satisfaction and to optimize internal processes." The theme was broadly conceived, simply stated, and critical to the organization. It stimulated participant interest and provided the focus for the work. Unlike other meetings where attendance is expected, employees were invited to attend the Open Space meeting; giving employees an explicit choice and establishing personal responsibility regarding meeting attendance. The voluntary nature of attendance insured and reinforced the two underlying fundamentals of Open Space: passion, without which no one cares, and responsibility, without which nothing gets done.

Four Principles and the Law of Two Feet established the framework of the RTC Open Space meeting. The first principle, "whoever comes is the right people," reinforces the need to focus on the people in attendance at the meeting rather than those not at the meeting. The second principle, "whatever happens is the only thing that could have," keep attention on the present. The third principle, "whenever it starts is the right time," reminds people that creativity can not be controlled. The fourth principle, "when it is over, it is over," allows individuals an appropriate amount of time to be effective. The Law of Two Feet emphasizes the voluntary nature of participation and the importance of individual responsibility. Employees not learning or contributing anything in a breakout session are encouraged to move to another meeting where they could be more productive.

Participants at the RTC Open Space meeting created an agenda more complex, comprehensive, and challenging than could have ever been designed prior to the meeting. For the RTC and most organizations within HP, agenda planning is considered a prerequisite to an effective and efficient meeting. At the Open Space meeting participants identified an issue or opportunity related to the meeting theme for which they had real passion. They took responsibility for conducting a session and recording what happened at the meeting. The proceedings of these sessions became the vehicle to move the work forward based on the group's willingness to spend time and energy on an issue. The design of the sessions varied and changed in order to respond to the diversity of the participants and the requirements of the work. When topics, participants, and leaders changed in the various sessions, so did structure and control.

Participants acted autonomously as they did not need to consult with others not in attendance at the sessions to discuss topics or make recommendations for actions. Attending meetings based on interest versus organizational role allowed for the development of new connections and the contribution of information and knowledge to the issue at hand. Freedom to make choices enabled cooperative and collaborative behaviors to emerge. Boundaries that previously separated employees disappeared in the Open Space meeting, as new relationships emerged based on common concerns and interests.

At the OST meeting similar topics were approached from a variety of perspectives and produced different outcomes. The redundancy of the meeting topics expanded the group’s learning capacity as people moved into different groups and transferred information shared in one meeting to another. This information sharing created a common ground for ideas and provided openings for innovation, creativity, and learning. Coming together in new ways allowed employees to articulate all the ideas and data they had around a particular agenda item. Listening to others and exchanging concepts led participants to see new possibilities for action. As the levels of access to information increased, new relationships were formed that created new, diverse networks for communications and cooperation.

An explosion of leadership capacity resulted from the fact that no one was in charge of the Open Space meeting. Leadership was shared among the participants and varied from meeting to meeting. A number of employees facilitated meetings who had never done so before, while many trainer-facilitators chose not to conduct a meeting.

The management team and participants were considerably impressed with the process and the results of the meeting that another Open Space meeting was conducted six months later with internal customers. A third Open Space meeting was held later with a smaller segment of the RTC support team. Since those initial three Open Space meetings, I have facilitated four other Open Space meetings for three different organizations within HP. The Human Resource (HR) department has conducted their annual planning meeting in Open Space for two consecutive years. Action items were identified and acted on after each of these meetings. As a member of this group I served as a catalyst and played a significant role in enabling the process and moving the work forward. The other two Open Space meetings I facilitated were for line organizations and focused on diversity themes. Recommendations from these meetings produced significant action items and follow-up did happen.

The seven OST meetings were successful in initiating and exploring business challenges. Consistent themes emerged across all of the meetings. The level of individual freedom at the meeting supported more collaboration and allowed for the establishment of new relationships based on mutual interest and concern. Emergent and shared leadership was present in all of the meetings. The diversity of perspectives increased the level of creativity and innovation as evidenced by the ideas and recommendations recorded in the meetings’ proceedings. Each meeting produced clear actions to move the groups forward to address important business issues and opportunities. However, the underlying OST concepts introduced in the meetings have not been adopted or sustained except by the HR group. The HR group has made a conscious effort to design their agenda at the beginning of their meetings and to support the Law of Two Feet. The other groups have not integrated the concepts from the initial Open Space meeting. Although the principles of Open Space are simple, they are the antithesis of how most meetings are convened and therefore difficult for people to incorporate into their meeting formats let alone their culture. Evolving from comfortable and familiar patterns is difficult and challenging to sustain in environments focused on control and predictability.

Introducing and accepting a new social technology is also a challenge for Organizational Development (OD) practitioners. Open Space requires a significant change in the way to behave in organizations. Some important questions to reflect on prior to introducing the concepts of Open Space are:

1. Are we ready and willing to be open to outcome?
2. Can we allow for the free flow of information that enables creativity and innovation?
3. Can the meeting invitation be inclusive to enable diverse perspectives and new connections?
4. Can we let go of our need to design the meeting and facilitate the design?
5. Can we consider that by doing less in the meeting we would actually create a more empowering environment?
6. Can we shift our perspective from "they need our help" to "the right people will come to the meeting with the appropriate knowledge, skills, and ability to accomplish the work in a style that supports who they are?"

In my experience of both facilitating and participating in large group meetings there is a significant difference of being in an Open Space meeting. Although other large group meetings are more participatory and democratic they continue to come out of a control and predictability model using a structured approach with detailed agendas, scheduled presentations, and group exercises. In contrast, Open Space meetings require us to give up control for outcome and to be open to innovation, creativity, and learning. OST meetings offer a way to move from a mechanistic to a more organic way of organizing.

Exploring self-organizing concepts will inform and significantly impact how organizations might compete and thrive and how we as OD practitioners might behave in organizations. We need to find new ways to deal with the tremendous rates of change, uncertainty, and complexity. Open Space may be one of the new social technologies that create the conditions for organizations to self-organize in novel and innovative ways. Shifting from using OST as an event to using the underlying concepts to create organizations that will thrive in the twenty-first century is a critical area to explore. OST exhibits the characteristics of healthy, complex, adaptive systems. Understanding how a few simple guidelines can act as a catalyst for innovation and creativity and the emergence of appropriate structure and control for a particular task will provide us with a new perspective for understanding change. Optimizing the self-organizing characteristics of autonomy, redundancy, diversity, and learning creates a more dynamic model that can capture the unpredictable and chaotic aspects of change and organizing confronted by today's organizations.

Recently five employees from HP Labs attended the OST workshop conducted by Harrison Owen. As catalysts for the transformation of HP Labs into the best industrial research lab in the world, they are exploring new technologies to enable this transformation. Open Space meetings may allow them to achieve this vision. Shortly, I will be facilitating the second day of an annual leadership conference in Open Space for a large HP division of 200 managers and individual contributors. The purpose of the meeting is to identify the issues and opportunities to achieve the division’s 1999 business goals. In the first month of 1999 I will facilitate another Open Space meeting for an Information Technology support group of 25. The meeting will focus on clarifying their vision and determining how they will achieve it. It appears that the space at HP continues to open.

Published in Vision Action, the journal of the Bay Area OD Network. Vol. 17, No. 4, Winter 1998, pg. 11.