by Giles Hopkins

After twenty-five years of management consulting and earning three degrees focused on the relationship of people, space, and participation, I have had the opportunity to accumulate a diverse collection of methods. Why, then, I ask myself, have I been using Open Space for group facilitation almost to the exclusion of everything else for the last five years? What is different about Open Space that I resist others characterizing it as "another trick of the trade?" After all, I have a healthy skepticism about any claims for "the one true way" whether it is educational methodology, parenting, or spiritual enlightenment. What is it about Open Space that I keep choosing it over and over again?

Over the past five years, I have used Open Space for 30 or so groups both large and small. Most of these groups are from the core market of our consulting practice, the international development community. They include divisions, departments, and senior management teams of development banks, UN agencies, and related organizations as well as interagency groups of specialists like economists, educators, and agriculturists. The groups are frequently very diverse in cultural backgrounds. Most of them are trying to mobilize themselves to deal with the challenges of changing situations of one kind or another both internal and external. As I have worked with each group the answers to this question - " why I am doing Open Space again" - have been adding up. Some of them are obvious: the quality of the results my clients get for their investment, the broad application possibilities, the cross-cultural relevance, the capacity to work with large groups easily, the relatively low cost. As I reflect on these answers, I see that there is another level of reasons I choose Open Space again and again, reasons that speak to another level of what Open Space is and why I find it different.

1. Open Space uncovers what is already there under the layers of organizational bureaucracy and procedural molasses. It uncovers the people with passion about important issues and questions who are willing to provide leadership and exercise their sense of accountability. I have taken to speaking about Open Space, the technology, with a capital "O.S." to distinguish it from open space with the small "o.s.", the place that is always available to those who need it, if they choose to open it. Open Space the technology, the principles and process, still seems me to be the simplest and cleanest way to "open space."

It has been instructive to observe that those of us who have been using Open Space for a number of years have rather unconsciously begun using a different phrasing to describe our work. After the first few Open Space events, we talked about "doing an Open Space." We would say, "I did an Open Space for so and so." Now, we talk about "opening the space." For example, "I just got back from working with one of my favorite clients where I helped them open the space for three days."

The space is already there, we "just" open it. So, the first reason, I keep choosing open space is that I believe it helps me work with what is already there rather than superimposing something that creates the illusion that I have some control or expertise that I do not. This is a powerful difference. Among other things, it saves a lot of time that might otherwise be spent on lengthy interviews, organizational diagnostics, and predictable resistance to an outsider's conclusions. Instead of putting people in team-building training to learn self-organizing skills, open space provides them the opportunity to do it and learn from it. Instead of employee surveys and suggestion boxes aimed at greater staff involvement, people in open space participate in real time on real issues. Instead of warning people that they will have to deal with a new reality of flat organizations and emergent leadership, they find they already know how to operate on a level playing field and recognize leadership when they see it in open space.

Many of the concepts preached by this new generation of organizational gurus are already there, already operating in organizations just beneath the surface - networking, self-managing teams, process owners, flat structures, etc. Open Space allows these things to emerge into the open (space). Participants are almost always anxious before hand and then feel they somehow know exactly what to do once they are in it. Like any new experience, open space benefits from practice. A lot of my work involves long term relationships with client groups and I observe that groups that open the space regularly become very sophisticated in managing the dynamics which come with broad participation, a free market, and a need for choices.

For example, veterans of Open Space often will offer the same session twice in different time slots and limit the number of participants who can attend a session so that they can have a real small group discussion. In advance of the Open Space they will issue "special" invitations and lobby particular people to come to a session to represent a point of view or act as a problem-solving resource. They will co-convene with colleagues who share similar concerns and prepare case material or provocative proposals. Front line staff will convene a session to find get people to act as a "consulting group" to come up with creative ways to meet client needs. Some of the sophistication revolves around how they handle their differing needs for closure and action planning. Veterans will specify not only a topic for their sessions but methodology. For example, they may convene a brainstorming session on the first day and then an action planning session on the second day around the same topic. Veterans tend to choose session titles which communicate objectives of the session as well as content like "Defining the Next Five Steps for Implementation of the Distance Learning Program" or " Brainstorming Ways to Get More From Mission Travel." Veteran groups also make more use of the opportunity to view and reorganize the whole wall of sessions, negotiating among themselves to move sessions around to get the sequence they think will culminate in strategic agreements.

Open Space is different because it is creates a space in which all of this experimentation and self-management by the group can emerge unhindered by some external facilitator's notion of the agenda. Rather than adding new layers on procedure or process, Open Space gets to the point quickly and gives people a chance to become more confident and competent in managing what they think is really important.

2 . Opening the space furthers my own journey. It helps me understand my own values and redefines what is easy and what is difficult in helping people in organizations work together. Like any elegantly simple understanding of human interaction, Open Space allows me to drop a lot of the high maintenance adornments of group facilitation where the group expected me to run the show, the fantastic finesse and subtlety with which all great facilitators think they manage the process for the benefit of the participants. It lets me keep the responsibility where it belongs.

I have always thought of responsibility like physical matter, it never disappears, it just changes shape and moves from place to place. In general, it is my experience, that if I have the responsibility, then the group does not. I want the group to have the responsibility - the feeling in that amazing moment in the opening circle when no one is certain who, if anyone, will pick up a marker and a piece of paper and break the silence to truly open the space with an offer of passion and leadership.

In this respect, open space feels clean and non-manipulative. I have the right relationship to the client and the client's work. It is not my work, it is their work, my job is to help them create a space where they can do that work. It is the closest thing to pure empowerment I have seen when there is a stampede of people ready to put their passion and leadership offers on the wall and when after three days of sessions and the space has been ritually closed, the session convenors convene themselves on the fourth day and produce a set of priorities and recommendations that are the first sign of life in the organization for years.

But opening the space is also much harder. I must be ready to actively communicate my complete faith in people. I must be ready to hold the door open even when there is pressure to close it from some participants who have traditionally exercised more power in a conventional process that doesn't provide quite as level a playing field as open space. I have to let go of any illusions I have that I could fix this group with a little intervention of my considerable expertise. I have to be comfortable with the real possibility that the value of my role (opening the space, holding the space open, and closing the space with care) will not be recognized by many of the group. I keep choosing open space, because figuring what I can let go of and what I can be open to, are the questions that characterize my journey at the present.

Open Space is different because opening the space challenges me as much as the participants. During the past two years in one organization, I opened the space for the top 60 managers for a two day strategic planning retreat, then for 100 economists for a two day professional networking retreat, then a two day strategic planning department retreat, and a one day retreat for all managers. At that most recent retreat, I let myself get a little cocky and embellished my introduction with some humor that I thought would indicate my understanding of the organization's dilemmas. My primary client, the chief executive, took me aside at a break and in a gentle yet direct way suggested I had stepped over an imaginary line which she was counting on me to keep in clear sight. I thanked her. She was right. There was still plenty for me to learn in opening space. Open Space keeps me honest. The process itself keeps me clear on the objective of giving open space away. Since then, I have succeeded in getting the organization to recognize an internal person I have been mentoring as their Open Space person and although they still call on me for advice, they now have the capacity to do it all themselves. It's a very good feeling.

3. Open Space carries within it, the seeds of its own dissemination. Open Space seems to be crowding out other ways I have used for helping groups become more effective because people take it away with them. After a client group has used Open Space once, there is a built lobbying group to use it again at the next retreat or department meeting. After they have used it twice, many people recognize that the experience is not a fluke and that the process quite easily accommodates a wide range of agendas and needs for differing degrees of resolution. The next step is that participants will start asking what I think about using Open Space for other work they are doing.

Several years ago, I open the space for an agricultural program division for a two day retreat. Many of these people come from the agricultural extension model of development assistance which was doing empowerment before anyone called it that. They understood the value and implications of Open Space immediately. The next week I got an email message from Africa from one of the participant's saying he had run his first Open Space and even with simultaneous translation it went very well. There are few things as satisfying as receiving electronic mail from a continent away reporting the success of a new colleague's first Open Space event.

Recently I had an internal consultant with whom I collaborated tell me that after more than a year in a new organization where she had expected to expand her horizons considerably, Open Space was the most valuable thing she had learned and it had come from the outside. Open Space isn't owned, it is co-created. When our company was asked to train a group of internal consultants in Open Space, we were puzzled for several months about how to actually train people in a way that would be consistent with open space. The answer was to use Open Space, to have them design what they needed and allocate the time and sequence the session. They, of course, did a fabulous job and brought tremendous thoughtfulness and wisdom to the three days.

Although it is possible to get training in facilitation of Open Space, there is no certification or licensing. You are responsible. Open Space can be explained in a lunch conversation and can still take a lifetime to fully understand. If you stick with the four principles and the law of two feet, the process is very tolerant of one's apparent initial ineptitude. I keep choosing to open the space because some people are always transformed by the experience and become either advocates or practitioners or both. This is how organizations are transformed one group at a time.

I am sure that in another five years, I will have a deeper understanding of why I continue to open the space. I have always been fascinated with how people interact with space. When I wrote my first research paper 25 years ago, the interaction of people and space was called environmental psychology. Now we think of space in every dimension beyond the mere physical, whether it is inner space or outer space or virtual space or cyberspace. For some people it's is tight space or dead space or just plain empty space. I encourage you to open it and see what kind of space it is and what you can make of it and be in it. I hope to see you there.

Giles Hopkins lives in Bethesda, Maryland with his wife and business partner of 24 years, Robbins Hopkins, two independent-minded sons, in an extended family household of eight supplemented by constant visitors who help keep the space open, entertaining, and nurturing on a daily basis. Hopkins & Hopkins, Inc. 301-469-8003.