What does Open Space do?

Invites collective awareness and organizes individuals to:

Resolve important or difficult issues and get the workflow back on track
Rally people and resources around new opportunities, or into new situations
Move strategic projects forwards with broad, cross-functional wisdom and support
Re-energize everybody's contribution to achieving strategic objectives and realizing more desirable futures
Channel the power of existing, organic systems into fast effective results

Open Space helps leaders (at any level) deal openly and directly with four challenging realities:

High Complexity - when no one person or group has the whole story or the perfect solution
High Passion, Concern or even Conflict - when the issue or opportunity is of real importance to people, when it really counts
High Diversity - when a variety of different stakeholders, skills, styles or opinions must contribute to one collective best effort; and
Deadlines are Looming - when the time to make wise decisions and take effective action is NOW, if not sooner

What is Open Space appropriate for?

Planning and completing special projects, with or without formally organizing a special project team
Resolving cross-functional questions, with or without formally organizing a cross-functional team or task force
Design and development projects related to new products, services, processes, customers, standards or other strategic change or improvement projects
Exploring and addressing a range of cultural issues, including diversity, learning, support, orientation, quality and the like
Rapid response to business surprises, whether to seize an opportunity or to pick up the pieces and get back on track
Creating strategic plans that everybody understands and cares about accomplishing; and
Staying on track with strategic check-ins that ensure that the details of the plan are still appropriate and still moving towards successful execution

Open Space meetings may be the fastest way to get an impossible amount of work done with any size of group, especially when the issues are larger, more complex, more diverse or more conflicting than your usual meetings.

While we never know exactly what solutions will emerge when we ask a group to go to work on a really tough issue, we can be sure that any organization or group can:

Engage everyone who really cares about the question, theme or situation
Identify all of the most important issues and opportunities related to the question, theme or situation
Create working groups to address all of the issues and opportunities identified as essential to success
Practice effective leadership, teamwork, planning and implementation behaviours without lectures, manipulation or other external motivation
Do everything that can be done right now or immediately following the meeting, in the normal course of business
Make plans for those issues and opportunities that will require additional study and review before implementation
Refocus attention on those issues and opportunities that require long-term or on-going monitoring, assessment or activity
Document the discussion, ideas, plans, commitments and other progress made on every issue and opportunity identified
Prioritize all of the issues and opportunities raised, based on the best judgment of the group
Associate secondary issues and opportunities with top priority items, so nothing important gets lost in the shuffle
Determine immediate next steps in each high priority area
Distribute the entire proceedings, priorities and action steps online, just days after the meeting ends
Raise the level of awareness, conversation, learning and activity around every aspect of the organization's most important business or community interests
Begin to raise the level of learning and contribution, organization-wide.

Bottom line -

Open Space is, far and away, the most cost-effective way of getting people, information and spirit moving in an organization, alliance or coalition

Open Space hits the bottom line hard in terms of lowered costs and increased revenue because it gets so much work done so quickly.

Projects