Reports on What Open Space Technology Is

Report 1 By Observer & Valuer of Open Space in Relation to other Approaches but not a trained facilitator. Chris Macrae - I welcome questions on this report at wcbn007@easynet.co.uk

I see Open Space as the simplest systemic method definable if you want to enable all people in a communal evolution -intimately connected by a conflict or innovation challenge - to participate openly. OS invites all the positive energy people wish to spend in connecting ideas on how to help everyone see ways ahead for resolving the challenge harmoniously for all concerned.

By simplest I mean that OS lets the people and the context enrichen each other’s actions and learnings without adding any extra instructions. If a facilitator adds anything to open space, they are imposing some sort of structure representing one person’s view rather than the open community’s view; and they are making the experience no longer wholly comparable to around 50000 pure Open Space stagings that have been planted around the world over the last quarter century.

By a systemic approach, I mean one that is designed to interface with other systemic approaches, which it hands over to or feeds from, depending on the boundary conditions designed around the approach. Across systemic tools, communal context is vital. Any system, indeed any systemic intervention , is misleading for all involved unless we can transparently map what future exponential -consequences and context- our design aims to change through integration of human productivities and demands, as well as learnings or other constitutional structures that sustain everyone's trust through everyone's gain.

A typical open space is expected to be a 3-day event in which tens, hundreds or even a few thousand people participate. So natural boundary questions to ask are : what happens after the open space, what preparations (eg invitations) come before an open space, can practices be learnt from open space that do not take 3 days to facilitate?

The reasoning for 3 days , at least as I see it, is: that if people are joining in who start in deep conflict with each other , the first day is needed to get them to see each other as people trying their best to resolve a conflict which is everyone’s responsibility to explore new ways round. The second day starts producing some actionable ideas, which get built on with the freshness of a third day, which also starts to summarise some of the emerging streams of solutions which people volunteer towards continuing and connecting after the end of the open space.

What Happens After OS?
Crucially this does depend on the community, the sponsor and the participants of the event being up for the full relationship permissions contract of open space. Namely as people leave the open space they will be given a full documentation outlining every meeting that took place, main action conclusions or learnings, who was at the meeting, how to recontact them, any other web links that people at that meeting all saw as seminal to their communed perspective. It also tends to depend on enough volunteers standing up during the third day to assemble some emerging project streams so that everyone can see that the open space is moving on around the breakthrough they have glimpsed. One way I would use to describe a successful open space at day 3 is that it has taken everyone simultaneously through the door of the conflict they shared so they can see what greater harmony on the other side looks like, but of course without a lot of action projects and reformed constitution for integral coordination the open space itself is no guarantee that necessary reconciliations needed to bring about the change will iteratively occur nor that this will be worked through in a way that propagates through the larger population involved with the conflict than the molecular representation of the actual participants of the OS.

What Happens Before OS?
One of the premises of Open Space is : the people who come are the right people. They have given their passion, time and willingness to try to engage in this deep challenge. However this also depends on an invitation process that clarifies the challenge's urgency, invites people from all sides and all levels of communal power or service etc. The creativity –storytelling, urgency of innovation etc - needed to get enough diversity of everyone connected by the communal challenge to join in , as well as the host’s authority, trust and overall love of everyone involved with the communal crisis, can make or break what the whole of the open space will achieve.

Participation in one fully performed open space is highly likely to change your view of efficient dynamics of meetings and ways of networking with people. As well as listening ever more deeply, it may encourage you to intervene in everyday meetings flows in far more wholly caring, transparent or contextually innovative ways than you were previously aware of. It seems that if you as an OS graduate come to be in charge of hosting a meeting and only have 90 minutes, half a day, or one day, as a graduate of open space, you will reframe what it is truly possible to expect from such meetings, as well as prepare in advance ways of starting that encourage questioning of conflicts before rushing to answers. We could start up quite a long menu of shorter meeting formats that are partially inspired by open space but the risk of rushing this is similar to that of adding extra facilitation into the 3 day open space itself (adding complexity or non-comparability with whole open spaces). So, I do not have space for this menu here!

What More?
If you do find open space a transformation breakthrough, what other systemic approaches may you love to know about.?
As a transparency mapmaker and valuer of open networks (system*system interactions including whether globalisation of market sectors value integration of all societies), I have started to want to connect different typologies of systemic approach, including the following :
In Open Space’s Conflict resolving territory, an approach which wholly interfaces with open space (because it achieves a different stage whilst flowing to and from open space) is Deep Democracy

For communities and global villages to be empowered by their own deepest contexts, we need both real social hubs (community centres people can freely meet at and socialise around) as well as virtual jams through which local communities can see which peoples around the world are confronting analogous challenges

We need a people’s economics –valuing context-up trust-flows, transparency and sustainability – which changes all the measurement professions of management to invest wholly in people and contexts through time- which audits potential conflicts ahead of time as there is no sustainable growth without leadership dedicated to removing conflicts that will otherwise conflict a system’s purpose and communal futures