For ten years, I was CEO of a multi-service social service organization. I had been in this position for six years before I was trained in Open Space Technology by its creator, Harrison Owen. Following my training I held a strategic planning meeting in my organization using a three day Open Space. About 100 staff gathered in a circle with no pre-planned agenda and experienced the normal angst of moving into something that felt very different. Added to the normal angst was some trepidation about what my agenda as their CEO was, compounded by the fact that I was leading the meeting myself rather than having a facilitator do so on our behalf. To their credit, they gave me the benefit of the doubt and assumed that my intentions were good.

The meeting was highly successful, bringing forward many critical business issues and opportunities that needed immediate attention to support us into our preferred future. As next steps from this meeting, it seemed logical to me to hold a series of Open Space meetings, once a month, to deal with the identified issues and opportunities that affected the whole organization (each meeting was scheduled for a three hour time slot because we couldn’t spare more than that away from our other work). The first of these, focused on our concerns about communication. (I have since found this is common in other organizations.) This meeting ended with easily implementable creative solutions that did not require additional resources and were acted upon immediately. The second Open Space focused on our Resource Development program. Resource Development was responsible for fundraising $2million annually. Most conflict within the organization was between the Resource Development team and the teams responsible for direct customer service. It came as a real surprize at this Open Space meeting, to the staff of Resource Development that the rest of the organization was interested in what they were doing, and that during the meeting there was a real buy-in to resource development and public relations being everyone’s responsibility whether it was in an individual position description or not. Further, exceptionally good ideas came forward that generated unprecedented success for us during a year that was a recession, in which other charities were not meeting their fund raising goals.

As CEO, I felt "blown away" by what was happening in the organization on a daily basis in terms of high productivity, high creativity, terrific staff morale. I wanted more and I wanted to sustain the level of what was happening. I understood that the change had something to do with our Open Space meetings, but I didn’t know quite what it was. Then there was a turn in what I was experiencing. On a personal level, I was finding that too many proposals for too many things were coming in at once. I felt as though the organization was "getting away from me", and that I no longer had a handle on everything that was happening within the organization. I knew that somehow my job felt different. About three months after our first Open Space meeting, the staff and I clashed very badly and it seemed as if my belief in what we could be and what we could achieve was disappearing.

But because of the high level of operating together that we had achieved, we were able to stay present to each other and work at what was going wrong. And the solution came, along with a major insight about an ingredient essential to this type of organization. We identified that we needed to know and agree upon what "the givens" of the organization, "the non-negotiables" were up front. This included what was fixed in our organizational structure, or our Board governance policies, or our budget allocations, and so on. A great deal of effort was taken to reduce this list of "givens" to its simplest form (ie: it was a given that we had an organizational structure, it was not a given that this must remain a hierarchy). Interestingly, in deciding that a new structure could be proposed, no one ever decided that it was important enough to change because our structure as it was supported our work well just as it was. Once we had agreed on the "givens", we collectively realized that everything else could be dealt with using Open Space principles as a means of operating together. And we wanted to operate together in the positive way that we had achieved and gave credit to the basics of Open Space as being the ingredients that enabled us to operate in this way.

We had an ongoing bulletin board that anyone could put an issue or opportunity onto at any time, followed by a process in which it was agreed upon whether that item would have a special meeting or would be worked at during a regular staff meeting. The person who put the topic up offered leadership to see it through.The corporate culture changed, with everyone recognizing that leadership was in all, that all had a right to work at vision, that all had a role in community, that all had responsibility for good management. The Law of Two Feet also applied. People used it to keep themselves in situations in which they were contributing or receiving, so that no time was wasted by anyone in meetings. Conflict was minimized as people learned to let go of their agendas by living their organizational life using the Four Principles.

We maintained ourselves in this manner, for almost four years. During that time we achieved funding for and created two new organizations, a large housing project and an inner city health centre. We received a number of awards acknowledging our leadership and our excellence as an organization. Productivity doubled when our client load did with no added resources available to us due to funding cutbacks, yet quality and creativity and staff morale continued to improve. We had in fact become and sustained ourselves as a high learning, high achieving, enspirited organization. We had uncovered a roadmap for getting there.

Unfortunately, within the Province of Ontario, there was a severe slashing of government funds to all non-profit health and social agencies. In the process, our organization lost two-thirds of its funding and we had to cease operations as we were, with most of the staff moving on to other work elsewhere. The happy news for me in this is that many of these staff have taken our operating practices from Open Space Technology and introduced them into their new places of work. They are influencing significantly the way that those organizations are functioning, challenging them to a better way of being in organization together. From time to time, I receive letters and phone calls telling me of the impact of Open Space on the lives of these people and their experience of trying to influence their organizations.

As an organizational learning consultant, I share this story with many senior managers, telling them that the learnings from this experience were now summarized, and had been used in a number of other organizations of the same size. My most recent experience of this was with a for profit wellness centre that needed to grow from being run by an enterpreneurial couple to an organizational mode of operating that was within their philosophy but tapping into the potential of the growing number of staff. We followed the formula of determining what "the givens" of the organization needed to be, and then held an initial Open Space meeting to look at issues and opportunities for the future with almost 70 of their stakeholders including staff. This was followed by specifically targetted Open Space meetings, as well as coaching of the owners by myself to move with the new way of being in organization together.

I also share the story with executives of associations, knowing that they can manage their provincial or national associations in a way that can benefit from Open Space Technology far beyond their experience of using Open Space Technology to conduct a meeting.

Many agree that they are ready to leverage from their Open Space event to attempt to achieve their own state as a high learning organization. At my urging, some organizational leaders are also examining going beyond what I had experienced by using their linked personal computers to create an electronic bulletin board for raising issues and opportunities to which people would still have to put their name and give leadership to. There is far less enthusiasm on their part to look at the technology available to actually hold their meetings "on-line"when they are separated by distance while still adhering to the principles of Open Space Technology, but it is my belief that this is an exciting next step to be able to take full advantage of people’s wisdom as it arises.

Birgitt Bolton

of Dalar Associates,

55 Ravina Cres.,

Ancaster, Ontario L9G 2E8

905-648-5775 (phone)

905-648-2262 (fax)

e-mail: birgitt@worldchat.com