| TO: Larry Peterson, Peg Holman, Marcelle Bastianello, and Harrison
Owen
FROM: Marlene Daniel SUBJECT: My attempt to make my voice present at the Open Space Research gathering later this week, a subject for which I have great passion and personal responsibility Please make this available as you see/feel/smell would be most useful.
The first paragraphs may useful, with modifications as you collectively see fit, for the Open Space Home Page Research blurb. What do you think? Conversation about this is invited. Please send me what gets generated at the gathering. I will miss seeing everyone. I am very excited about my work with clients that teaches me daily. The technological advances that pull organizations to continuously change also remove walls and boundaries, connecting us globally. In the Information Age of the world wide web, what it means to be organized must fundamentally alter. Research exploring Open Space as a culture is useful to redefine what constitutes being organized in a world characterized by interconnectedness and interdependency. In the old understanding of hierarchies, organizations were perceived as fairly rigid structures of domination and control, where the sum of the parts was understood to equal the whole. Research approaches consistent with this mechanistic world view also dissected components into parts to understand wholes. The first research on Open Space (Daniel, 1994) showed that Open Space could not be understood by dissecting parts. Instead, Open Space must be understood in terms of the whole context of multi-leveled natural order, as connectedness and interrelationships, as interdependence. This matches the view of life discussed by Capra (1996) as "the web of life", understanding living systems as interconnected networks. Therefore, my premise is that researching Open Space is useful to contribute to the growing body of knowledge that explores organizations as self-organizing living systems. Open Space also capitalizes on emerging trends today. Open Space introduces organizations to a simpler, more effective way of organizing that engages the fullest intelligence of all its people. Open Space employs people's desire to contribute, learn and find meaning. In Open Space events people experience their organization as a piece that can foster wellness, return people to the experience of wholeness, and help people experience themselves through their interconnected networks of concern. Over ten years of field experiences described by facilitators and client leaders demonstrate consistent outcomes from investing in Open Space events. Yet research on Open Space is important beyond "proving" that Open Space events exceed expectations for team building, creative problem solving, introducing cross functional teams, and strategic planning. This we already know. [And those that don't know this won't be convinced by anything that a biased group of Open Space facilitators construct.] Instead, research on Open Space is important to learn more about fostering continuous change in organizations. Ethics, passion, and compassion blended in Open Space. What organization today wouldn't benefit from being more open, resilient, and flexible? In the information age, success depends on an organization's ability to capitalize on emerging opportunities through learning new ways of working together. Greater flexibility and responsiveness in our organizations is critical to organizing for continuous change. Yet current models employed by organizations are organized for stability. It is counterintuitive to respond to the complex pressures on organizations today by letting go of control and opening spaces. By opening spaces, the creative leadership and inspiration critical to sustain high performance emerges. Research on Open Space could help us learn about patterns of networks, about organization in far-from-equilibrium states, and about the interconnectedness of the system's components which results in feedback loops. The questions worthy of research dollars are the ones no one knows the answers to yet, explored in a spirit of collaborative inquiry. I recommend that the following of Capra's for sel-organization be used as the theory base to research the impact of opening space in organizations. Capra defines self-organization as "the spontaneous emergence of new structures and new forms of behavior in open systems far-from-equilibrium, characterized by internal feedback loops . . . " (Capra, 1996, p. 85). The theory of self-organization claims that a constant flow of energy is necessary through the system for self-organization to take place. This theory could be applied to understanding Open Space events as an introduction into a novel culture, where ethnographic interviews would be conducted before, during, immediately following, and then 6 months after an event exploring broad questions such as: "What is happening here?" In studying organizations over time, researchers might learn to explain why in some organizations, the original Open Space event is a catalyst that transforms the organization while for other organizations the event is productive and a landmark, yet the organization goes back a few months later to a state of equilibrium. What is necessary to keep an organization in far-from-equilibrium states long enough to evolve fundamentally? An interesting research question that would indicate if Open Space produced self-organization for the system might be: During and after the Open Space event as described by participants, does the organization create novel structures and new modes of behavior in the process of developing, learning, and evolving? If not, was the organization in a state of equilibrium before the event? Can Open Space be a way to shift an organization into a far-from-equilibrium state? Whatever is learned about Open Space applying the theory of self-organization will help organizations that have invested in change efforts such as Continuous Process Improvement (CPI) and Total Quality (TQM). Perhaps the reason so many of the expensive and long TQ implementation methods failed was that the cultural shift was attempted while maintaining equilibrium. The research project conducted by Marlene Daniel (1994) showed that participants of an Open Space event made new connections, shared information across previously impenetrable boundaries, and created innovative solutions to issues through exploring interdependencies and the inherent strength of wholeness. Effectiveness came from letting go of control not seeking it, from sharing information not hoarding and protecting it. Fear did not shape actions; passion and personal responsibility did. Since organizational change originates when people within the organization change their awareness of who they are, Open Space provides the necessary freedom and openness to enable people to learn and reflect. In interviews conducted before, during and after an Open Space event, participants described their Open Space experience as: - being energizing, free, and open
Replicating Marlene's 1994 Rockport study, viewing Open Space as an initiation into a culture would be useful in other sites with different facilitators [Harrison was the facilitator for the Rockport study] before doing any evaluation study using questionaires. From replicating the ethnographic study, the reliability and validity of a questionaire would evolve grounded in the perspective of the participants. Otherwise, the research community may find questionnaires shaped by facilitators of Open Space as invalid. The questions asked determine what can be found. Average responses are not as interesting as outliers. Additional descriptive studies using ethnographic methods would allow participants to tell their stories in their own words, with less researcher bias. Benefit would be derived from the researcher consciously clarifying his/her stakes through the process of gathering data. Having more than one researcher present on the site to observe and interview would add to the richness of the study. Multiple researchers could then triangulate, code, and label data following procedures in Miles and Huberman (1984) for data reduction, data display, and conclusion drawing. Grounded theory would be built from the thickly descriptive, contextualized accounts of life within Open Space. The broad question for the 1994 study on Open Space was: "What is happening in this Open Space meeting?" Additional questions framing the investigation were: - What actions and interactions occur?
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