Open Space Technology – stage 5 speech

Time: 5 – 7 minutes

Open Space Technology is not so much a technology as a technique and it’s not so much a technique as an experience. Imagine yourself in a function room with two concentric circles of between 140 and 200 people gathered together as a result of an invitation to participate in Open Space.

In this corner here, appropriately enough, there would be a table with tea and coffee which is available all day long. In this other corner here you would find a row of laptop PC’s with some printers as well. Above all that is a banner that says News Desk.

On this wall over here is an even larger space marked out with a piece of red thread and above it a long banner that says Community Notice Board. On the other walls are various posters here and there.

The group are welcomed to open space. It is then explained to the group how it started 25 years ago, how it has been used in over 160 different countries, in large corporations, in high tech companies, by bankers and by church groups, and community groups, by government departments and school boards. It has being used by groups as small as 10 or 12 and as large as 2,000. It has being used by participants as young as 14 or 15 years of age in high schools and it has been used by those in their sixties and seventies. It has being used to help create peace between Palestinians and Arabs and it has been used in conflict zones all over the world.

Open Space is also a process. The first part of process is the invitation were all those that might be interested are invited to come along and participate. They’re presented with a theme such as “where do we go from here” or “looking towards the next ten years” or “why do we exist as an organisation”. Big questions are asked in the theme about how do we get this done or how do we solve this crisis.

According to Harrison Owen, the grandfather of Open space, it works best where conflict is present, things are complex, there is huge diversity of players and the answer was needed yesterday. And the more of all of that you have, the better Open Space works.

Option 1 – explain the processOn the floor in the centre of the circle you will finds sheets of paper and some markers. The participants are invited to come forward and take a sheet of paper and a marker, to write a topic or issue they want to discuss on that piece of paper, to stand up in front of the assembled company and to call out their name and the topic that they want discussed. They then take that sheet of paper and place it on the Community Notice Board. They can place as many topics as they want to on that notice board and as many people who are interested can place topics.

The only proviso is that if you organize a session you undertake to keep notes of who attends and to report back to the news desk regarding what was discussed and any conclusions reached.

Next we have what is called The Marketplace and this means they all get up off their chairs, come forward and go to that community notice board and examine all the topics that are posted there and decide which ones they want to attend by signing up on the topic they’re interested in. Signing up doesn’t mean they have to turn up. It is just an expression of interest. There is also a quick and easy way of allocating meeting spaces and session times.

That’s it. Everybody is then told to go off and start work and invited to return at the end of the day.

It’s been referred to as having The Energy of a Good Coffee Break, a Practice in Invitation and Passion Bounded by Responsibility. What way it’s experienced, it gets the most important issues discussed and it always, always works.

Mr Toastmaster