Open Some Space

Would you like to open some space in your organisation or community? I can help you. I’ve been opening space for over twenty years, using Open Space Technology and other approaches. If you’d like to organise an Open Space Conference then contact me. You can reach me easily… By email at paul@cats3000.net Or by telephone…

Open Space Technology and Open Space

Open Space Technology opens space. That might sound a bit strange, or even a bit obvious, but bear with me.  I’ve said that for a reason. In the Open Space Technology community of practitioners and fans I’ve encountered over the last twenty years, there is a strong behavioural pattern of not changing the first and…

Exploring the Principles: When it’s over, it’s over

This is my personal favorite principle of open space technology. Why should a session run to the end of its allotted time on a timetable if the conversation has reached a natural end? Why should a vital conversation be brought to a premature end if it needs to flow on? When we self-organise a conversation,…

Exploring the Principles: Whoever comes are the right people

Like many of the open space principles, they are true at an archetypal level. The people who are in the room to get to work together on something are the people we have. Where attendance in that room is voluntary, we have a community formed out of freedom, and that commitment means the right people…

Exploring the Principles: Whenever it starts is the right time

We can become trapped by all kinds of dogma in our lives. One of them is start times. Businesses clock people in and out and there are sanctions for poor timekeeping. We grow up with school timetables and many of us probably remember being told off or even punished for being late to class. In…

Trapped by Complexity – the role of the Physical Space

Some of my favourite stories of Open Space events are those where the whole thing was “cobbled together” and turned out to be all the better for it. Often it wasn’t cobbled together at all; there was simply plenty of self-organisation on the day, rather than lots of pre-design and organisation. What we are really…

The Emergent Moment Before You Speak

It is the moment before you speak. A circle of people sits, waiting. (They could also be standing). You are about to launch into the Opening Circle. You are the facilitator of an Open Space Event… One facilitator told me: “I have no idea exactly what I am going to say, until that moment. I…

Growing Your Work in Open Space

I shared some of this at WOSonOS2012 – the world Open Space on Open Space which took place in London in October. At the core was the notion of moving away from pushing, selling, marketing Open Space in favour of simply responding to the questions of the times in which we live and describing OS…

Facilitation metaphors and Open Space

Trawling through the many web sites and articles reporting stories of Open Space events, a range of metaphors can be seen at play in the language used by the reporters and storytellers. One of the most prominent is “facilitate”. What is facilitation? “The term facilitation is broadly used to describe any activity which makes tasks…

The Vital Link Between “Re” and “OS”

The prefix “re” is defined in the dictionary as: prefix meaning “back to the original place, again” Back to the original place, again. Now, hold that in mind for a few moments. I’ve suggested elsewhere that Open Space, whatever it becomes locally labelled as in a specific context, is a self-organising process for a community…

Who is the Jerk on the Right?

Take a look at this picture. It is a picture of an Open Space Conference I facilitated in 2012. There’s a man standing, speaking to the group, gesturing with his hands. The Open Space market place is open, and is about fifteen minutes old. There is a man, standing to the right of the speaker,…

The Fundamental Principle of Open Space

The fundamental principle of open space: For an open space event to be truly emergent, the facilitator must also behave emergently. Sadly for some, open space has become a fixed structure, a frame, and many adhere to it dogmatically. At best it is then a Nightingale’s cage with the door open, but not a true…