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Harrison Owen on Open Space

October 28, 2004 By Uncategorized

Whilst Googling himself, Harrison Owen came across an old interview he gave to a German journalist on Open Space, leadership and self-organization back in 1998. It’s a neat summary of Harrison’s thinking at the time, and still refreshingly current to me even now. Here’s a taste:

I found out that one of the most interested things about “Open Space” gatherings is that dialogue is a sort of – formally considered – intense listening, this seems to be the coin of the realm, that is what happens. I suppose a whole mass of other behaviors, if you will, we may spend a lot of time training the people to do, self-managed work teams, real leadership, things like that. These seem to be automatic occurrences in “Open Space” environment, I don’t think it?s any tribute to “Open Space”. I find myself thinking more and more that self-organizing systems natural function as dialogue and human self-organizing system naturally function in a dialogue mode. They manifest leadership as necessary, they experience themselves as one community. In a curious kind of way, stuff whether it is community building, team building, dialogue teaching, empowerment or leadership development and all those sorts of things – they seem to happen in an “Open Space” environment with no prior training, without even mentioning the word.

Lovely. That has certainly been my experience, especially in the last two events I have facilitated, one for a global financial services company and one for a Native Friendship Centre. Two wildly different groups, and the same kinds of result. All of the management theories and sociological analyses one can muster falls away in the face of opening space, where anything is possible, and true, authentic manifestations of these things show up all the time.

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