Unexpected Media

Open Space

Came across ‘Open Space Technology‘ as a result of meeting Steve Moore of Policy Unplugged who is working on an InSync event we’re doing about the Olympics. He was persuasive enough about it as an approach to structuring meetings that I ordered Harrison Owen’s book on how to use it.

First impressions are that, like so many of these techniques, it restates many ideas familiar from other places. Arguments for doing things ‘in the round’ were fundamental to the first theatre company I worked with, Word and Action; they were rooted in the work of Stephen Joseph who introduced theatre-in-the-round to this country.

The late Roy Stringer introduced me to a way of holding a conferences without an agenda based on the systems theories of Stafford Beer; we organised an event together for the DTI working with a facilitation organisation, Team Syntegrity, which used Beer’s methodology.

Open Space is, in the end, a way of providing structure for improvisation which is at the heart of any creative process. There seems to be a lot that’s good about it but I’m a little wary of evangelists who proclaim it as the only way. Jazz has always been my model for improvisation (it relies on trust, structure, competition and risk-taking); you don’t always want to work with the same chord sequence.