Engage People with Open Space [Yes! And Blog 153]

“Float like a butterfly. Sting like a bee.” Muhammad Ali, former World Heavyweight Boxing Champion If you hold large gatherings for staff and clients, want to increase engagement and don’t want to create agendas, find speakers, obtain their presentations and run through time consuming rehearsals, Open Space might be the answer. I was one of the organisers of the SOLWorld Conference at Oxford University. This is an annual gathering of Solutions Focused practitioners from over twenty countries. Conference is not the best word to describe the SOL World events. My recollection of conferences is of speakers boring hundreds of people for thirty minutes with presentations that could have been read in five. Mind you, I did attend conferences on payments. SOLWorld in contrast is, as someone fed back to us, “inspiring, stimulating and fun-filled.”  If you would like to experience a taste of it, you can download my photo diary here. One feature of SOLWorld gatherings is the use of Open Space, a form of meeting in which people self organise and for which there is no predetermined agenda. Owen Harrison, an organisational transformation (OT) consultant, allegedly “discovered” this style of meeting after the attendees at his first two OT conferences found the coffee breaks the most useful aspect. As he had no part in designing the coffee breaks, he decided to relieve himself of the burden of designing the event and hand it over to the participants. Open Space was born. If you hold large gatherings for staff and clients and are looking for an alternative to creating agendas, finding speakers, obtaining their presentations and running through time...