As mentioned here, here and here, Caterfly’s Open Smart Transformation is a derivative of Prime-OS, from which the specific and elaborate work and practice of Open Space Agile adoptions by Daniel Mezick is derived. Caterfly applies the same principles and practices which have been developed in detail for implementing Agile at scale in organisations to any form of organisational systems adoption or transformation (e.g. lean, teal, creative economy, sociocracy, holacracy, responsive etc). The Open Space frame is the same, just the content, what is being implemented through coaching and co-creative iterations, is different.
More significantly, if you’re involved in adoptions or transformations, agile in particular, then you should read The Open Space Agility Handbook. This is an excellent clear and easy to follow how-to guide, which I have described in more detail in my book review and my blog.
Daniel Mezick, his group and many associated agile coaches are organising and running various intensive courses in Open Space Agile Adoption processes, which cover both the theory and practice of agile adoptions using the invite and co-create approach in the USA and Canada, such as the next one in Montreal. To get updates on courses on offer please refer to the course schedule.
Finally nothing better than hearing managers within companies who have witnessed and experienced the process and led massive transformations within their organisations themselves using the process. There are excellent video interviews available, but Daniel also occasionally runs live telephone 90-minute introductory discussions on Open Space Agility with one of the client managers participating as guest, so people can hear and ask those giving testimonials questions directly. If you wish to join one of these telephone discussions, please check the training schedule.
Finally to get a complete overview of all the resources available through Open Space Agility, it is best to check out the home overview page.
Have you ever been in an organisation where you were good at your job, efficient and productive, satisfied by what you achieved, hopeful about future prospects, respected in your expertise, and really feeling part of a good team? ……. and then all of a sudden, one day, out of the blue, you are told that some changes were going to happen; ……. and that a that a team of consultants were coming in to bring about these changes and introduce a new system (SAP, agile, lean………). This team then devotes time and energy explaining the purpose of the change, the why and how, and it all makes perfect logical sense, indeed the proposed changes are not dissimilar to changes you had proposed to your manager in the past. And yet, despite not disagreeing with the reasons for the change, your heart feels crushed, you somehow feel totally betrayed, utterly let down, completely undermined, leaving you shattered and dispirited.
Why? Because nobody in the organisation, none of your superiors, ever bothered to ask you. The changes touch on the essence of your work, and still you were not even consulted. Instead someone at the top decided this was a good idea, let’s bring in some change experts in to implement it, and the team of consultants, who know nothing about the operational side of the work you do, are brought in to tell you what to do. Why aren’t you, as a long-time loyal employee, dedicated to achieving the aims of the organisation, being at least asked about the matter, never mind consulted? Obviously you feel disrespected and undermined, but also angry – your self-esteem is under attack. Suddenly this new system seems alien to you.
While on reflection you would have been quite an enthusiastic proponent of the changes being proposed, because they were brought on over your head without your consent and without your views being heard, suddenly you feel estranged, and this new system appears alien. You lose motivation, you don’t want to be part of it, and you start silently resisting the change. Not because you disagree fundamentally or logically, but because of the manner this was done over your head. You were never given a say in the matter, nor a choice to opt in or out. You no longer feel respected and esteemed, you become cynical, and you, perhaps unconsciously, resist passively.
Consequently you are now branded a change resister, and it is deemed you need to be “managed” with care. You are singled out as a laggard and for now ignored. It becomes a double blow, not only do you feel betrayed and undermined by the initial imposition, now you start losing confidence, your professional competence is called into question, you no longer feel part of the team, indeed resentment becomes stronger and stronger, you no longer want to listen, and a vicious cycle builds up. Suddenly you are a serious resister, an enemy of change, you are no longer for us but against “them”. While the consultants work on the more amenable employees, you become “the” problem, and your survival in the organisation becomes questionable, gradually instigating fear and a destructive atmosphere.
And all because, initially, you were never asked. You were not invited to contribute to the new way forward, it was simply imposed on you from above. You feel alienated, because you were not invited to co-create the organisation’s future, and you no longer feel part of the team.
Not consulting, not listening to, and not inviting those who do the work, those closest to the products/services and the users, and those most connected to the processes that create value, not bringing them in into the change process, not inviting them to co-create the change, are all prescriptions for failure. They reflect distrust and disrespect of an organisation’s own people. And yet this scenario happens again and again, person after person, time after time, organisation after organisation. What a waste of good resources! What a waste of energy! What a waste of great talent!
The solution ‘should be’ fairly straight-forward, do exactly what’s missing: ASK! Invite the affected employees to co-create the change and thereby make it their own. Why don’t so many organisations follow this most basic of human leadership principles? Possibly a legacy of the command and control management attitudes of the last century? Possibly due to an inherent unconscious management distrust (and disrespect) of employees. Possibly due to lack of awareness of the inhumaneness of mandation, an unintended consequence of classical intervention. Possibly due to worries about having to “manage” large numbers of employees invited to co-create the change. And possibly simply, it has to be said, due to a lack of know-how – managers may know that engaging the workforce might be important, but they just don’t know how to go about it. The challenge is how to do it at scale.
This is exactly the issue and the know-how a new book just silently published recently seeks to address. It is called The Open Space Agility Handbook. It is written and conceived by Daniel Mezick, respected senior agile coach in the Boston area, author of Culture Games, together with a team of experts, Mark Sheffield, Deborah Pontes, Louise Kold-Taylor, Harold Shinsato and OpenSpace Technology founder, Harrison Owen. ‘Agile’, for those of you not from the IT or software development world, is a working practice applied by software engineers, derived from ‘Lean’, which enables software development teams to be much closer to customers and to respond to their needs nimbly, thus being agile. The practice is anchored in the Agile Manifesto.
This diagram is copied directly from the Open Space Agility website. and represents an overview road map of OSA used in the book.
While this new book focusses on ‘Agile’, it is really about organisational transformation. The title, The Open Space Agility Handbook, sounds pretty technical and unobtrusive. And in one sense that’s all it is, as the title says, it’s a handbook on how to adopt agile practices, using a double Open Space Technology frame. What the book’s title doesn’t betray, however, is the transformative power of its approach. On one hand the book is simply a step by step guide on implementing agile. On the other hand it presents a revolutionary approach to agile adoptions, and beyond, in fact it tackles head-on one of the key challenges of organisational interventions and change management itself. As innocuous as the book may seem, don’t be fooled by its simplicity. It describes a simple solution to one of the most difficult challenges of management, that of scaled organisational change.
While the handbook concentrates on agile only, the principles and philosophy behind the invitation approach is applicable beyond agile – you can replace “agile” with “lean”, “conscious” or “responsive”. The approach could just as easily apply to lean, teal, responsive, peer-to-peer learning, distributed leadership, conscious business, environmental sustainability, beyond budgeting, sociocracy and indeed any other form of organisational transformation. Thus whether you like agile or not, if you are involved in adoptions, implementations or transformations, this book is for you. Instead of mandating change from above, which leads to resistance or internal sabotage, the approach urges organisations to ask and invite the relevant work-force to co-create the change together, as a collaborative iterative effort, rather than imposing from above.
The approach is based asking those doing the work about proposed adoptions or change and inviting them to co-create transformation together, using a combination of Open Space Technology and standard coaching iterative methods, ….. and thereby avoiding the tremendous waste of talent and resources arising from the imposition of change. As the concepts of INVITATION (as opposed to directed or imposed), PEER-BASED SELF-ORGANISED LEARNING (SOLE) and CHANGE CO-CREATION become increasingly understood and appreciated in organisations, so this simple how-to book will find a growing audience in and beyond agile. The approach is completely in line with what the Stanford and London Business School guru Gary Hamel has termed the ‘change platform’.
This is a brilliant how-to book. It addresses the problem of resistance and poor engagement in agile adoptions and organisational change. Why is it, for instance, that the majority of agile adoptions, despite huge investments, fail? The approach presented resolves root causes and offers a completely fresh and novel way of implementing agile. And while this new book focuses on ‘agile’, it applies equally to organisational transformation overall.
The title, The Open Space Agility Handbook, sounds pretty inconspicuous and unobtrusive. And in one sense that’s all it is, as the title says it’s a handbook on how to adopt agile practices, using an Open Space Technology framework; a step by step how to guide on implementing agile. What the book’s title does not betray, however, is the transformative power of its approach. It represents a revolutionary approach to large scale agile adoptions, and beyond; it tackles head on one of the key challenges of organisational interventions and change management itself. As innocuous as the book may seem, don’t be fooled by its simplicity. It describes an elegant solution to one of the most difficult challenges of management, that of scaled organisational change. What’s more, it is completely fit for purpose in the age of distributed leadership, it follows the principles of opt-in and it walks the talk of self-organisation.
On the surface the book is for agile coaches, trainers and leaders wanting to implement agile into their organisations, using a scalable process of invitation and co-creation, rather than dilapidating mandation and imposition. The book describes in immaculate detail, yet in very clear easy to understand language, how this can be done. The book is supported by beautiful diagrams step by step in a highly practical way, with very easy to follow hands-on instructions. The diagrams all form part of a larger diagram representing the overall road map. As a guide it is beautifully presented.
On a deeper level it is far more than a handbook. While the book illustrates the how, it represents a fresh way of adopting agile. Although concentrating on agile only, the principles and philosophy behind it have ramifications beyond agile, and the book should appeal to a wider corporate audience, in fact to anyone seeking to introduce system change in an organisation. The approach could just as easily apply to the adoption of lean, teal, peer-to-peer learning, distributed leadership, conscious business, environmental sustainability, beyond budgeting, reinventing organisations or indeed any other form of organisational transformation.
But why do we need a different approach to agile, lean, teal etc adoptions, or to change management? Simply put, because the majority of agile adoptions, lean implementations or change management interventions don’t work (the statistics vary from 60% – 80% failure rates depending on how one defines failure, anything from simply not achieving expected results to catastrophic breakdown). One reason is that these interventions are mandated or imposed, without consulting those doing the work. This leads to unintended consequences of resistance at best, silent internal sabotage at worst.
In the case of agile those doing the work are software engineers, people who are both very intelligent as well as often introvert in nature: they resist imposed change, but do not articulate their views. Instead they either simply ignore directives (‘internal sabotage’) or walk away completely (and they can afford to). Corrective notions of “improving communications” and “achieving better buy-in” completely miss the point. What is needed is to invite the relevant work-force to co-create the change together, as a collaborative iterative effort, with everyone’s perspective valued.
How can one invite a whole department or even a whole large company to co-create change at scale? Through a process of self-organisation in a framed structure of iterations and experimentations, which fully engage the relevant workforce constructively in the process. This is achieved by applying the principles of Open Space Technology at the beginning and the end of the timed iterations. Open Space Technology is a self-organising large scale counter-intuitive meeting of minds format which has been tried and tested over the last 30 years in over 150 countries, always with great success. However, if you want to know the details of how it all works and how to do adaptions and transformations, read the book!
_____________________________________________
This review was originally posted as a review on Amazon on 17 Dec 2015
Date & Time: Tuesday 19 January 2016, 06:45pm – 10:00pm
Location: St Ethelburga’s Centre for Reconciliation and Peace 78 Bishopsgate, EC2N 4AG London, United Kingdom
For all the talk of self-management, isn’t it time we experienced it in action? What does it look, sound and feel like? Join us for an evening of self-organisation in action where you can experience what one type of meeting of the future – a meeting without manager – might look like.
At our December meeting we explored the role of leadership, in a structured workshop. This time we will examine “leaderlessness” in an “unstructured” workshop – or so it may appear through the lenses of our traditional view of organisations. In this event, we will be self-organising on the spot around YOUR issues and YOUR passions about reinventing work. What are you noticing about the future of work that you haven’t told anyone about?
You are invited to consider what it is you would like to make happen, in your workplace or with others in this network. Bring your thoughts and ideas on the night to share with others. What are you going to do about your intentions? Who knows what collaborations or projects might emerge?
The space will be open for you to follow the issues you are passionate about. To start us off Francois Knuchel and Martin Grimshaw of CATERFLY will open and hold the space and “enable” us to self-organise our event, with a view of achieving two things: Firstly, focus completely on you, the participant, in terms of what you’d like to make happen beyond these events, and secondly to do so in a self-organised fashion, without manager, without speaker, without facilitator, and thus to walk our talk.
Do come along to this important evening. You’ll have deep conversations on issues you care about, and do so in a self-managed way; and you’ll have lots of fun in the process!
For information, updates and to book your place go to the RSA Events page.
Join the online discussions on the network’s Facebook page
Location St Ethelburga’s Centre for Reconciliation and Peace 78 Bishopsgate, EC2N 4AG London, United Kingdom
This is a RSA Reinventing Work Network event. It is free to attend and open to members of the public, but all wishing to attend must register.
Caterfly presents: a 1 day participant-led ‘Open Space’ event exploring the need for transforming the way we work together, the move toward more collaborative, responsive workplaces, for businesses that place the customer at the centre, with respect for people and planet, the reality, complexity and barriers to change, and ways to move forward.
This is a follow up event to ‘Why aren’t Organisations Shifting?‘ event in July, for those who want to continue the deliberations as well as for those who missed the first event – a second opportunity.
Share. Learn. Connect: Building alliances for collective impact
Just as the combined efforts of the powers-that-be in the 16th and 17th Centuries were unable to halt the progress of Copernicus’ Revolution in astronomy, so also today’s big hierarchical bureaucracies, though seemingly all-powerful, will ultimately succumb to the power of a better idea for running organizations—better for customers, better for employees, better for managers, better for society, and better for the organizations and their investors.
Steve Denning, Forbes: The Copernican Revolution In Management
The art of hosting participant-led unConferences, solving complex problems, accelerating action, leading change in organisations, and hosting conversations that matter.
An experiential 2 day co-learning workshop: Brighton, with Martin Grimshaw and Francois Knuchel
#OpenSpaceTech
Why?
Do you want a way to rapidly launch new projects, bring participation, engagement, equality and inclusion to your organisation or event? To harness collective ingenuity for problem solving? To lead transformation that is real and lasting? To drive innovation?
What?
Learn how to organise and facilitate gatherings using Open Space Technology, a method by which a large group of people can organise themselves into a conference, complete with agenda, break-out sessions, action planning and reports, with almost no preparation before-hand. Open Space allows each participant to do what they came to do, and can be a very effective way of launching large-scale change or responding to a looming crisis. Who? This workshop invites those who are new to using Open Space and those who already have some or even extensive experience of using it, to co-learn together, deepen our practice, and share our experiences of using it. In this 2 day workshop we will have the opportunity to experience Open Space as attendees commonly do, with space to reflect and to go deeper into designing an event as part of a broader programme.
How? This workshop will be run as an Open Space so that participants can learn experientially, while learning how to design, prepare and facilitate an Open Space event, including tips and tricks, likely issues that may be encountered, follow up and incorporating an event within a wider context or strategy.
What is Open Space?
Open Space Technology is a format for organising compostable conferences, unconferences, meetings, stakeholder engagement, BarCamps and CityCamps, with maximum efficiency and minimum time and resources. It is a form of ‘crowd sourcing’ which can be used to bring together a company or any group or organisation to focus on a specific problem or question. Open Space allows for participants to co-create experience, learning and solutions in a way that unlocks creativity.
Open Space is used by large companies, local government, community activists, and forward thinking organisations everywhere, from gatherings of 5 to several thousand people, from a couple of hours to several days.
Please contact us if you would like to hire us as facilitators, consultants or trainers. Martin and Francois also use the Open Smart Transformation model at Caterfly to bring about deep and lasting transformation or problem solving in organisations with Open Space.
More workshops and events:
See Martin’s site for coming Sociocracy and Mindfulness workshops: http://2bwow.org.uk/workshops/
November (tbc): Shift2 – an unConference. Following the success of Shift, we’re hosting another.
Please click on subscribe for low volume updates and new articles, and click on events for schedule.
Tuesday 21 July 15, Victoria, London: Shift, a participant-led Open Space event Why aren’t organisations shifting? www.events.caterfly.co.uk
Applications of Open Space Technology in 21st Century
self-organising network organisations
Open Space Technology (OST) has been around for almost 30 years, has been applied in 150 countries, with 300,000+ groups or events, involving millions of people having unique experiences through OST. OST (Open Space Technology) has been used:
as a participant-led alternative to conferences (hence “unconference”)
for conflict resolution (in large scale peace deliberations)
for stakeholder dialogues in a variety of contexts and disciplines
… and many situations involving deep discussions, where there is a burning issue, high levels of passion and no preconceived outcome. OST works beautifully because it fulfils some of the conditions for participant engagement, such as connection, communication and meaning. OST has also been used extensively for various intra-organisational purposes within organisations with huge success.
Despite the successes, however, OST has rarely become mainstream practice within organisations. This may be because it does not sit well with the planned, budgeted, command & control management style of most organisations. Moreover OST does not create legacies, i.e. it does not lend itself to anyone taking credit for successful outcomes, because success is collective. So as Steve Denning of Forbes laments in his Drucker Forum 2015 blog “… despite almost a century of fine management writing …. about the humanist strand of management thinking that celebrates team and collaboration through respect for customers and workers as human beings ……. , the ugly truth is that its lasting impact on general management has been limited.” … so it is with OST, too.
Nevertheless, over the last few years, as the nature of organisations has gradually been changing, or is being forced to shift through the internet and social technologies, so the demand for OST is on the increase. As we see from some of the thriving pioneering new organisations (as described for instance in Frederic Laloux’s Reinventing Organisations), the definition and purpose of organisations are changing from linear, mechanical, predictability-based, controlled and top-down structures to fluid, organic, emergent, distributed and self-organising networks.
These new organisations thrive on continuous reconfiguration, plasticity, responsive innovation, synchronicity, eco-centricity, co-creativity and mindful empathy. They are self-organising (and continuously self-re-organising) iterative learning network cultures that are ‘wirearchical’, locally attuned and able to adapt to the prevailing fast changing, diverse and highly complex conditions. All of which is not possible unless “led” bottom-up with all employees or members fully engaged and empowered, and with ‘teams of teams’ exploring and cross-communicating.
It is in these new kinds of organisations that OST could become more common, especially where cross-functional alignment and coordination is sought. OST thrives on unpredictability, fluidity and complexity, where the more conventional interventions of “managing” all of the factors do not work. Assigning people to solve highly complex problems can be self-defeating, for instance, because the very selection predetermines certain outcomes which often turn out to be counterproductive. OST on the other hand provides a platform for self-selection (opt-in), cross border serendipity and self-organisation. In particular OST is superb at enabling what MIT’s Human Dynamics Lab research has found to be one of the necessary ingredients for high perfoming teams: regularly exploring information outside one’s team and usual circle of colleagues. OST excels at holistic cross-functional interactions.
As OST within organisations expands, so will the need grow for more skilled OST facilitators who are able to “hold space” without disrupting the interaction flow, and create “containers” within which authentic cross-fertilising exchanges and deep dialogue can occur. They will also need to be able to create peer-based self-organising learning environments, which will form the source of an organisation’s client- or user-connectivity, iterations and innovations.
OST is the face to face synchronous counterpart to digital networks and social technologies (as used in intra-organisational online networks). While online asynchronous connectivity plays an expanding role in these organisations, people still need direct human contact and serendipitous interaction, and OST excels at this. Indeed recent research at MIT’s Media Lab has shown that face to face communication far exceeds video-conferencing or email in enhancing team performance, so direct interaction will increasingly neeed to supplement digitalisation. It is for these more organisation types or modes of operation that new applications for OST will emerge, all involving larger numbers of people from across different parts of the organisation coming together and communicating across borders. Let me list just a few fresh applications of OST:
As a tool for bottom-up culture change, exploring new ways of working and interacting, establishing collective values and practices through experimentation and co-creativity
For strategy development, adjustment and alignment across the whole organisation (somewhat akin to Hoshin Kanri), with a stronger emphasis on implementation.
For R & D product/service design and development, periodic consolidation and synchronisation (possibly combined with ‘big room’ Obeya)
As a complex problem-solving tool, involving multiple stakeholders with diverse perspectives and no predictable solutions (a more self-organised version of S. Beer’s cybernetic Syntegrity)
As a way for organic organisational reconfiguration (bottom-up re-organisation) to respond to changing circumstances (rewiring team networks)
To enable cross-partycollaboration, e.g. prototyping with designers/ developers, customers/users and producers/suppliers (horizontal feedback)
To create learning organisations through pan-organisational peer-based learning environments which are self-managed and self-regenerating
For many, if not most organisations today, a lot of the above may seem obscure, abstract and remote, far from the current reality. In fact most organisations today are still run in a predict, command and control fashion. At the same time, however, there is an understanding amongst leaders this needs to change. Even though little has changed so far, some leaders are talking of an organisational paradigm shift. Yet many of them have little clue how to go about this. This may partly be because their leadership style stands in the way of culture change: as Einstein said, “you cannot solve problems with the same solutions that created them”. Awaiting a generation change is probably not an option.
My take: Do not even try! You cannot plan, command and micro-manage this shift. Instead let the workers, employees and members of the organisation configure the change through emergence. Give the organisation a platform for letting this happen. Stand back, let go and let it happen. This is exactly where OST can work its wonders. Whatever emerges is the right thing to emerge. Leaders should not try to be heroes and do it themselves, rather let the whole workforce authentically engage, experiment and co-create the shift together. Let Open Space Technology do what it does best. This is probably the most important application of OST currently needed – as a tool for organisational transformation and paradigm shift. Let transformation happen. Let open space begin.
The art of hosting participant-led unConferences, solving complex problems, accelerating action, leading change in organisations, and hosting conversations that matter.
An experiential 2 day co-learning workshop: Brighton, with Martin Grimshaw and Francois Knuchel
* We regret that this date has been postponed – we are currently arranging a new date in October ’15 – please contact us to request a preference and early bird discount *
A very limited number of ‘pay-what-you-want’ tickets are available on application. You just need to tell us a dazzling (but short) story of why you think the world will be a better place for you being on the course.
Do you want a way to rapidly launch new projects, bring participation, engagement, equality and inclusion to your organisation or event? To harness collective ingenuity for problem solving? To lead transformation that is real and lasting? To drive innovation?
What?
Learn how to organise and facilitate gatherings using Open Space Technology, a method by which a large group of people can organise themselves into a conference, complete with agenda, break-out sessions, action planning and reports, with almost no preparation before-hand. Open Space allows each participant to do what they came to do, and can be a very effective way of launching large-scale change or responding to a looming crisis.
Who?
This workshop invites those who are new to using Open Space and those who already have some or even extensive experience of using it, to co-learn together, deepen our practice, and share our experiences of using it. In this 2 day workshop we will have the opportunity to experience Open Space as attendees commonly do, with space to reflect and to go deeper into designing an event as part of a broader programme.
How? This workshop will be run as an Open Space so that participants can learn experientially, while learning how to design, prepare and facilitate an Open Space event, including tips and tricks, likely issues that may be encountered, follow up and incorporating an event within a wider context or strategy.
What is Open Space?
Open Space Technology is a format for organising compostable conferences, unconferences, meetings, stakeholder engagement, BarCamps and CityCamps, with maximum efficiency and minimum time and resources. It is a form of ‘crowd sourcing’ which can be used to bring together a company or any group or organisation to focus on a specific problem or question. Open Space allows for participants to co-create experience, learning and solutions in a way that unlocks creativity.
Open Space is used by large companies, local government, community activists, and forward thinking organisations everywhere, from gatherings of 5 to several thousand people, from a couple of hours to several days.
Please contact us if you would like to hire us as facilitators, consultants or trainers.
Martin and Francois also use the Open Smart Transformation model at Caterfly to bring about deep and lasting transformation or problem solving in organisations with Open Space.
Caterfly in partnership with There’s Better Ways Of Working present:
The art of hosting participant-led unConferences, solving complex problems, accelerating action, leading change in organisations, and hosting conversations that matter.
Why? Do you want a way to rapidly launch new projects, bring participation, engagement, equality and inclusion to your organisation or event? To harness collective ingenuity for problem solving? To lead transformation that is real and lasting? To drive innovation?
What?
Learn how to design and facilitate gatherings using Open Space Technology, a method by which a large group of people can organise themselves into a conference, complete with agenda, break-out sessions, action planning and reports, with almost no preparation before-hand. Open Space allows each participant to do what they need to do, and can be a very effective way of launching large-scale change or responding to a looming crisis.
Who?
This workshop invites those who are new to using Open Space and those who already have some or even extensive experience of using it, to co-learn together, deepen our practice, and share our experiences of using it.
How? This workshop will be run as an Open Space so that participants can learn experientially, while learning how to design, prepare and facilitate an Open Space event, including tips and tricks, likely issues that may be encountered, follow up and incorporating an event within a wider context or strategy.
What is Open Space?
Open Space Technology is a format for organising compostable conferences, unconferences, meetings, stakeholder engagement, BarCamps and CityCamps, with maximum efficiency and minimum time and resources. It is a form of ‘crowd sourcing’ which can be used to bring together a company or any group or organisation to focus on a specific problem or question. Open Space allows for participants to co-create experience, learning and solutions in a way that unlocks creativity.
Open Space is used by large companies, local government, community activists, and forward thinking organisations everywhere, from gatherings of 5 to several thousand people, from a couple of hours to several days, even with little notice or preparation.
* A very limited number of ‘pay-what-you-want’ tickets are available on application. You just need to tell us a dazzling (but short) story of why you think the world will be a better place for you being on the course.
Please contact us if you would like to hire us as facilitators, consultants or trainers.
Martin and Francois also use the Open Smart Transformation model at Caterfly to bring about deep and lasting transformation or problem solving in organisations with Open Space.
More workshops and events: Going Deeper with Open Space (August, 2 days), Shift: Why Aren’t Organisations Shifting? (21 July). Click on events for details.
Please click on subscribe for low volume training updates and new blogs
Caterfly presents: a 1 day participant-led ‘Open Space’ event exploring the need for transforming the way we work together, the move toward more collaborative, responsive workplaces, for businesses that place the customer at the centre, with respect for people and planet, the reality, complexity and barriers to change, and ways to move forward.
Share. Learn. Connect: Building alliances for collective impact
Just as the combined efforts of the powers-that-be in the 16th and 17th Centuries were unable to halt the progress of Copernicus’ Revolution in astronomy, so also today’s big hierarchical bureaucracies, though seemingly all-powerful, will ultimately succumb to the power of a better idea for running organizations—better for customers, better for employees, better for managers, better for society, and better for the organizations and their investors.
Steve Denning, Forbes: The Copernican Revolution In Management
Anyone exploring any form of organisational transformation should find it useful follow recent developments in the agile adoption world. You may also want to explore and join THE OPENSPACE AGILITY Facebook page, as well as follow Daniel Mezick’s blog and the OpenSpace Agility blog.
