What I learned from Harrison Owen, creator of Open Space Technology

Since Harrison Owen died on March 16, 2024, I have been thinking about the gifts of Harrison’s creation — Open Space Technology — and how it shaped my world view and my life. I have also been appreciating what knowing Harrison, the person, has meant to me….

Beginnings

When I ran into Open Space in 1994, I was primed for it by research I had done in 1993 for US WEST on “knowledge transfer” and “organizational learning.” I had reached the conclusion that a great way to encourage such things was by encouraging random encounters. Open Space was a practical way to make that happen.

I learned of Open Space from a friend who sent me an article from Training Magazine: Welcome to Open Space. (I couldn’t find the article online so scanned my tired, hard to read copy.) The last page of the article had Harrison’s phone number. So I called him. That led to attending an OST workshop in New York City and doing a 250-person, 2.5-day Open Space with Harrison. At his suggestion, we made a video about the meeting: U S WEST Open Space.

What have I learned from Open Space?

Harrison invited people to answer that question in 2005. My answers haven’t changed, though they have broadened and deepened since then. So I will share my 20-year-old answer then build on it. And then talk about what I learned from the man himself.

Lessons from 2005…

Harrison’s question: “What you, personally, have learned — about Open Space, yourself in Open Space, about organizations in Open Space”

My response:
Where to begin? Open Space changed my life. So many, many lessons. And
after 11 years of working with it, I still feel I am just at the beginning
of my learning.

Here is a bit of a retrospective of learnings.

The miracle of my first Open Space was to see that it somehow enabled the
needs of the individual and the collective to be met. That’s when I fell in
love with it.

I think my very first practical realization was that as a facilitator, I
wasn’t responsible for other people’s experiences. What a revelation! I
could do my best to create the conditions for the work to be done. Beyond
that, it was up to the people in the room.

Over the next several years, I found myself talking about my lessons from
Open Space:

Focus on essence — the form of OS is so elegantly simple that it is a clear
message that what is most important is the core content of whatever the
subject is. I remember a conversation with Chris Kloth at
OSonOS IV [Open Space on Open Space — an annual practitioners gathering] in Washington, D.C [1996]. He told me that where other change
communities he was a part of spent most of their time focused on questions
and arguments about process, the OS community was always asking about
essence, purpose, the core meaning of whatever it was we were discussing.
A comment from a participant: “one day in open space is the equivalent of two years of hearings.” I think this is because when all you’ve got to pay attention to is the essence of what’s important, well, it sure makes it easier to let all the nonsense fall by the wayside and focus on getting something done!

Simplicity of design — you gifted me/us with a very profound design
question: what is one less thing to do? (and I would add implicit in the
question: and have this be whole and complete?) While I sometimes joke that
you came to this by being a master of laziness, I think continually doing
less ensures the focus remains on what is most important. Whether OS or
just life, I find this insight of remarkable power. Anytime a group is
struggling, with how to do something, this question cuts through the mess.
During my Total Quality days, there was a saying: “remedy first, then deal
with the root cause.” My definition of remedies were they always added more
steps — made things more complicated. When the root cause was handled,
100% of the time, it resulted in less steps — a simpler process. And it
always required looking at the essence, the purpose as the starting point.

Invitation/Inclusion — you talk about invite whoever cares about the
subject and welcome the stranger — whoever comes. It is such a huge gift
to accept the rightness of whomever and whatever shows up. It is also at
times a deeply courageous act of faith. Through the years I have seen
people healed by the experience of being welcomed, with all of their quirks,
of feeling heard. I have also seen it as a challenging test of people
uncomfortable with those who are different. The rewards for those who
usually exclude others and for those who are often excluded are powerful.
People discover compassion in themselves. Outcasts experience something
often unfamiliar: support. I remember years ago at OSonOS in Monterey
(1998?), an intense day 2 opening circle where there was this conflicted
discussion of “in group” and “outsiders”. Finally, this woman, I don’t know
her name and I never saw her again, got up and walked, or perhaps she flew,
around the circle, inside and out. Her words were something about belonging
coming from within ourselves. It shifted everything.

Generosity of Spirit — you gave OS away, no trademark, copyright,
certification or other hurdles. You said there is one responsibility — to
give back what you’ve learned. I look at the extraordinary community that
we’ve created — one that shares its stories, its fears, triumphs,
insecurities, and questions. I follow several learning communities. This
one is my home. It is in part because of the incredible ethic of sharing we
gift to each other.

Abundance — there is always enough for what is important. When I’ve
underestimated the number of break out sessions for an event, I often joke
that time and space are infinitely expandable and people figure out where
and when to meet. This is a reminder to me of just how incredibly creative
we are as a species when something is important to us. People find
remarkable solutions.

These were my first deep lessons from living with Open Space. I think
somewhere about this time, I began to realize that self-organization and
spirit — the two ways I talked about OS — described the same phenomenon in different language.

And then Spirited Work began [the brain child of Anne Stadler, my partner in many OS adventures]. While I already understood Open Space was way more than a good meeting method, this quarterly foray into living in Open Space opened a new and deeper journey of understanding. It was Anne Stadler who helped me understand that the Law of Two Feet is about taking responsibility for what you love. I now believe this is the essence of Open Space. It is the power of this one idea — to take responsibility for what you love — that creates the remarkable invitation to listen to our internal voice and act on its message. Now I understand the dynamics behind what I originally loved about OS: when people take responsibility for what they love, they discover that others love the same things. Thus, the needs of the individual and the collective are met.

At Spirited Work, watching Anne Stadler showing up wherever there was
dissonance or conflict, I learned to welcome disturbances. I came to
understand that they are indicators that something new wants to emerge. And it was watching the patterns of behavior at Spirited Work, the complex, unpredictable human behavior as people experimented with living with spirit in the material world that I have come to understand what Open Space governance looks like, what it means to make difficult decisions in Open Space (way beyond consensus), the role of silence in individual and collective learning.

I now understand the dynamics of emergence when consciously embraced.
Emergence is spirit in action — where people discover that what is most
personal is also universal. When this happens, what we in the OS community call Convergence naturally occurs. People move into coherent individual and collective action. This has shaped how I see my work today — to grow the capacity for emergence through caring for ourselves, others and the whole in service to meaningful purpose. What I see today is that Open Space provides the essential conditions for emergence without the destructive force that comes when the disturbances that signal something wanting to emerge are resisted. It happens by asking an attractive question that matters (the theme), inviting all who care to take responsibility for what they love, and by putting them in a circle to begin and end each day to reflect together.

This pattern enables people to step into what they fear with some glimmer of hope that something useful will happen. And, miraculously, time and again, it does. [For more, see Emergent Design for Generative Change or my book, Engaging Emergence: Turning Upheaval into Opportunity for a deep dive.]

Doing the international Practice of Peace conference [in 2003] — an experience planned in OS mostly by people from the Spirited Work community — brought new lessons. We took the leap that we would have sufficient participation to fund inviting 10 OS practitioners from conflict areas from around the world. We not only accomplished that but created an experience that many, many participants described as life changing. [In fact, I am still in touch with many of the people who were there.]. They describe some variant of feeling their own capacity to make a difference. I got a deeply embodied experience of what Anne Stadler named the Radiant Network — that innate knowing that we are all connected, that we are held in some mystical way. When my heart is open, I feel the connection. When not, the connection is still there, it is just hard to believe it exists. My lesson from PoP is that what is on the other side of emergence is the coherence of the Radiant Network. The most powerful OS events bring people to where they feel a sense of collective consciousness. They touch that place of deep, personal meaning that connects them to others and they have at least a glimmer of their connection to the whole.

Today, I wonder about how the people I have worked with have been touched by their time in Open Space. How have they been changed by the experience? What has been the effect when OS is used over and over in a community or organization? How have people and collectives been changed by the experience?

I believe that we are growing people’s capacity to deal with what they fear,
what they resist by offering them a path to emergence that runs through
powerful, attractive questions. What are their stories?

Harrison, for all that you are and all that you have done, I thank you.
Finding you and your work was a turning point in my life.

Lessons since 2005

Perhaps the main lessons are about what it means to live conscious of complexity in human systems.

A marriage of science and spirit

I love that Open Space can be explained through the lens of complexity AND the lens of spirit. The first time I did a workshop with Harrison, he told me of his dissertation research while he was a practicing Anglican priest. (Mind you, this story is my memory of a conversation from 1998 so it may be somewhat inaccurate.) Harrison was reading the text of the bible in the original Aramaic. He said at that time (mid-1950’s?) the common thinking was that seeming contradictions in the Bible were considered mistakes. They were about God as immanent and God as transcendent. His dissertation asked a question: what if the contradictions were on purpose? That God was both immanent and transcendent? God was present in embracing the contradictions. That that led Harrison into a study of chaos and order. So his studies of complexity preceded viewing it through science. I loved that both explanations worked.

I took me on a deep dive into the science of complexity. A few of my favorites:

Corning, Peter. “The Re-emergence of ‘Emergence’: A Venerable Concept in Search of a Theory.” Complexity 7, no. 6 (2002): 18–30.

Johnson, Steven. Emergence: The Connective Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software. New York: Scribner, 2001.

Kauffman, Stuart. At Home in the Universe: The Search for the Laws of Self-Organization and Complexity. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. [Harrison pointed me to this one.]

Waldrop, M. Mitchell. Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Chaos. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992

Transition from hierarchies to networks

I think the question I am most immersed in these days is how do we support a transition in how humans organize themselves from hierarches to networks?

I believe Thomas Kuhn said in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions that how humans organize is influenced by the science of the time. Autocrats were common when “God’s will” was our prevailing explanation for how things worked. The industrial revolution brought us hierarchies. Now that technology enables us to see systems, giving us a “macroscopic” view, networks are becoming visible. They’ve always been there. It’s just we now have technology that helps us work with them. I wrote an article in 2010, Leadership in a Networked World, about the principle aspects of networks — links and hubs — and the implications for human organizing.

Open Space gives us great examples of what happens when networks reign. They liberate human spirit because they put what we care about at the center. They are a form that relies on people belonging by bringing their unique selves. Just as OST is an exquisite mix of the masculine (the directionality of purpose) and the feminine (the circle of community), networks are an exquisite mix of “we” — belonging and “me” — attending to what I love.

I think the many conflicts we face are because of this transition from hierarchies to networks. My bias is that the more of us who support the shift towards networks, the greater our chance of dealing with the overwhelming issues we face. Opening space helps people embody this very different way of working by connecting us to our own humanity, to others who see the world differently, and to our wholeness. Our connectedness is most visible when our hearts open. Open Space helps that happen.

It has been my journey with Open Space that has led me to this view.

What I learned from knowing Harrison

I’ve saved my final lessons for reflecting on what knowing Harrison has meant to me.

Beyond the knowledge that I’ll always be asking myself what is one less thing to do, three essential lessons come to mind:

Be myself. Harrison was unapologetically himself. He could be blunt, rude even. And alcohol was an issue. In other words, he was hardly perfect. Still, I always felt his love and respect. His ability to just show up is something I deeply admire. I hope I continue to shed whatever layers are left in me of worrying about what others think. He and Anne Stadler are my standards for what that looks like.

Be generous. Harrison gave away Open Space but did it with the responsibility of giving back what you learned. What a gift! It is a recursive, generative stance. Give something away with the responsibility of sharing learning that can reinforce and grow more of it.

My favorite story: The first time we did an OST workshop, I wanted to add a live Open Space and build the training around it. Harrison said he thought it was a bad idea but if I wanted to try it, we would. I thought that was incredibly generous, that even doubting it was a good thing to do, he was willing to support me. We did. And he told me afterwards that he thought it worked well. Generosity again in acknowledging my idea was a good one.

As I find myself partnering with younger people more and more, Harrison’s willingness to support a young colleagues is something I take to heart and have now lived from the elder’s view.

Love is all there is. I was so struck during my last conversations with Harrison! Even knowing his days were numbered, he was joyful. There are tears in my eyes as I write this. Perhaps it is the ultimate lesson. When I be love, everything else happens in that context. There’s a poem someone gave me when my mother died that I often share when someone dies. I carry it in my heart and spread it as best I can. It is how I leave you with this last lesson that Harrison so embodied:

GIVE WHAT’S LEFT OF ME AWAY

When I die
Remember me with a smile and laughter.
If thoughts of me provoke no love,
Only sadness and tears,
I ask that I be soon forgotten.

Give what’s left of me away
To children and old men who wait to die.
And if you must cry, cry for your brother
Who walks in grief beside you.
And when you need me,
Put your arms around anyone,
And give them what you need to give me.

I want to leave you something.
Something better than words or sounds.
Look for me in the people I’ve known or loved,
Or helped in some special way.
And if you cannot give me away,
Let me live in your eyes for awhile,
As well as in your mind.

You can love me most
By letting love live
Within the circle of your arms
Embracing the frightened ones.

Love doesn’t die, people do.
So when all that’s left of me is love,
Give me away.

— Merrit Malloy