THB NEW YORK TIMES, SUNDAY, JUNE 5, 1994 
 

By CLAUDIA IL DEUTSCH 
 

NAMES W. DEVLIN was baffled when he walked into the Rockport Company's 
distribution center for a companywide meeting in October. The meeting had 
been billed as a powwow to discuss Rockport's mission, one considered 
important enough to shutter the footwear company, a subsidiary of Reebok 
International, for two days. 

 But here was this cavernous room some 20 miles from the company's 
Marlboro, Mass, headquarters, with nothing in it but hundreds of chairs 
arranged in a circle and an empty bulletin board. No keynote speakers, no 
agenda, no reading materials, nothing. 

 "All I could think was, how is this possibly going to work?" -Mr. 
Devlin, a traffic and shipping supervisor, recalled. 

 Most of the 350 Rockport employees who milled into the room had the same 
reaction. And when Harrison Owen, a Potomac, Md., management consultant, 
stepped into the circle and described the meeting's ground rules, the 
skepticism and bafflement increased. 

 Anyone with a "passion" about any company-related subject, he told them, 
should write it at the top of a large piece of paper and tack it to the 
bulletin board. Other people could then sign up for a discussion group 
about it. 

 Looking back, Rockport people are astonished at the many people who did, 
indeed, suggest topics, attend meetings and come up with ideas that have, 
in many ways, changed how Rockport is run today. 

 "We now have a book of ideas that vary from how to get suppliers to send 
shoelaces on time to how to find out what our competitors, are doing to 
how to help Rockport's women succeed better," said Richard Roessler, the 
human resources executive who set up the meeting. 

 Probably the only person who isn't stunned by the Rockport meeting's 
success is Mr. Owen. An Episcopal priest and-self described individual 
rights activist, he held various governmental posts before becoming an 
organizational consultant 15 years ago. And he developed the concept of 
"open space" meetings - where attendees break into ad hoc groups to 
discuss anything they think is germane - after years of hearing people 
wax eloquent about the good experiences they had at meetings outside of 
the prearranged sessions. 

 "The only times when people held adult conversations seemed to be the 
coffee breaks," Mr. Owen said recently, not even slightly In jest. "So I 
created a meeting format that was like one long coffee break." Open-space 
meetings are unlike conventions, in that there are no predetermined 
speakers or workshop topics. Nor are they like executive retreats, which 
normally are a mix of prearranged topical sessions and unstructured 
"getting to know you" time for high-level executives who have been sent 
off to some remote enclave. 

 Open Space meetings can be held on site, provided there's a big enough 
room, and typically throw together executives and blue-collar workers. 
They operate on two basic premises: the best people to discuss a subject 
are the ones who want to, not the ones who are forced to; employees who 
have the chance to discuss things are the ones most likely to improve 
them. 

 "People worry too much about motivating workers," said Seymour S. Rao, 
chairman of the marketing department at Long Island university's C.W. 
Post campus, who recently changed his faculty evaluation policy after an 
open-space meeting he held with his staff. "Workers start off motivated. 
You have to get rid of whatever is demotivating them." 

 Mr. Owen has made a tidy business but of his concept. He and a handful 
of other consultants he has tutored have held open-space meetings for 
such diverse clients as the Presbyterian Church, Honeywell, the World 
Bank and emergency medical services groups. 

 Most of the meetings are part of larger organizational consulting 
assignments. But in the last year, Mr. Owen has done about a dozen 
stand-alone meetings like Rockport's, it prices ranging from $6,000 for 
one day to $10,000 for three days. And he has begun training corporate 
executives to hold their own open-space meetings. 

 Thee logistics of an open-space meeting, If not the agenda, are quite 
carefully controlled. First, there is the circular layout of the chairs. 
Mr. Owen got the idea from work he did in African villages, where 
meetings were always held in a circle. 

 "Who ever heard of a family square, or a rectangle of friends?," he 
said. "The circle is the natural form of communication. You are not 
looking at the back of people's heads, or ignoring people at your 
sides." 

 Then there is the meeting's length. Mr. Owen says that a one-day session 
can set the groundwork for interdepartmental communication. If a company 
wants a comprehensive report, like at Rockport, two days are needed. And 
if it wants employees to immediately form groups to carry out their 
ideas, Mr. Owen recommends three days. 

 Mr. Owen concedes that open space is no panacea. "It won't work when 
management is attached to a particular outcome," he said. "And it's a 
great way to design a new billing system, but a lousy way to implement 
it." It also cannot guarantee that ideas won't be sidelined if the 
employee who thought of them loses interest, or if management does not 
provide support to carry them out. 

 And it won't work for a management that is allergic to bad news. Mr. 
Owen tells this cautionary tale: "I held an open-space meeting for one 
company that wanted to discuss its future. The consensus after the 
meeting was that there was no future." The company has since 
liquidated. 
 

BUT when open-space meetings do work, they can yield astonishing results. 
Within a few minutes of the Rockport meeting's commencement, employees 
started scurrying to write down topics. One wrote, "Who are Rockport's 
people, and what do they really do?" Another asked why the headquarters 
group had a better fitness program than the distribution center. Another 
asked how compensation was set, another about the attendance policy. 
Someone asked whether Rockport should have a formal management 
training program, another whether paperwork could be reduced. Mr. Devlin, 
the shipping supervisor, set up a workshop on writing a statement of 
goals for the company. 

 Within 30 minutes, more than 100 signup sheets were tacked to the wall. 
The impromptu groups formed, with the people who wrote down the subjects 
choosing the meeting times and serving as group leaders. 

 Afterward. the leaders typed into computers the recommendations that 
came out of their meetings. Later, back at work, many of them spearheaded 
committees to see their recommendations through. 

 Since that meeting, Rockport has hired a training specialist. It has 
gotten discounts for distribution center employees at local health clubs. 
It has put in E-mail, in part to eliminate paper memos. 

 There's an employee directory, listing everyone's name, title And phone 
number. Company newsletters, which someone complained arrived 
haphazardly, are.now delivered with Paychecks. And while Mr. Devlin's 
high-minded idea of a corporate goal statement has fallen, by the 
wayside, he has worked on one for his own department. 

 "The meeting brought to the forefront ideas on people's wish lists," Mr. 
Devlin said. 

 And It continues to have ramifications. "The departments are inviting 
people over to see how they work, what they do," said Kathleen A. 
Preville, a human resources clerk. Moreover, Rockport people keep 
referring to the book in which all of the suggestions of the meetings 
were printed out. 

 "It's not a dead document at all," said Mr. Roessler, the human 
resources executive. 
 

 For Rockport, which has a history of informal meetings and retreats, 
open-space meetings were a natural evolution. They are a far more radical 
approach for bureaucratic organizations, where support staffs are often 
left out of the decision-making process. 

 That certainly was true at the quasi-governmental World Bank. "They had 
been trying for years to figure out better ways to use their resources," 
said Giles Hopkins, a consultant in Bethesda, Md., who with his wife, 
Robbins, has held about 20 open-space meetings for World Bank 
divisions. 

 World Bank executives, citing sensitivity to any publicity in their 50th 
anniversary year, declined to talk about the meetings. But the Hopkinses 
offer numerous  tangible proofs that the meetings yielded results. 

 One World Bank department responsible for helping a third world country 
develop power resources recognized that the money it was funneling 
through the county's Government would be better invested in helping the 
Government Privatize the power system. 
 

 Another restructured its own bureaucracy so that projects that were once 
assigned to individuals are now assigned to teams. That way the person in 
charge of, say, enhancing a country's power supply cannot accidentally 
sabotage the work of the person in charge of environmental protection. 

 Yet another group ranked the progress of continuing projects, 
back-burnered the ones that seemed unwieldy and concentrated on the two 
that seemed winners. 

 "At a conventional meeting. the idea of putting a low priority on a 
project that the board had once approved would never have even come up," 
M& Hopkins said. 

 Sorting through projects and setting priorities can be as difficult, 
albeit for different reasons, in newly merged companies as in entrenched 
bureaucracies. That's why Corporate Express, a rapidly growing office 
products distributor based in Broomfield, Colo., has adopted open-space 
meetings. 

 In February, the eight-year-old company bought Hanson Office Products, a 
competitor that was, in fact, larger than its new parent. It set up a 
three-day open-space meeting at Aspen Lodge in Estes Park, Colo., mainly 
to shift the competitors-turned-colleagues in the same direction. 

 Computer issues, compensation issues, all the problems of combining 
disparate company systems were discussed and tentatively worked out. 
"They said, 'We won't change our name to yours, but everything else is 
fair game,'" recalled Gary Gonsalves, a former Hanson executive who is 
now vice president of sales for the Southern California division of 
Corporate Express. 

 Mr. Gonsalves, one of 10 executives whom Corporate Express has sent to 
Mr. Owen for training, recently held an open-space meeting in Tennessee, 
where three Corporate Express branches were being consolidated. 

 "The fidget factor was high at first, like it always is, but we soon had 
39 Issues written on the wall," Mr. Gonsalves said. 

 The meeting ended with the skeleton of a new system for reducing 
installation costs by having sales representatives and installers visit a 
client's work site together, and with a workable compensation program 
that combined the best of all three branch systems. Mr. Gonsalves also 
believes that some problems were smoothed out without ever making it into 
the book of recommendations. 

  "Someone would state a problem, and someone else would say, 'Hey, I can 
solve. that for you,'" he said. "One thing you discover with open space 
is your people know what changes they need to make. All you have to do 
after they've made their recommendations is say, 'Go.'" 
 
 

Breaking an Organizational Logjam 

 Convincing people that an agendaless meeting will work requires a leap 
of faith that often is not made until desperation sets in. 

 For years the Presbyterian Church USA, the Chicago-based umbrella group 
that sets church policy, held annual meetings of some 600 elected church 
officials from around the country, with the idea of setting priorities 
for the church for the coming year. And every year the meetings would end 
without any long-term decisions being made. 

 "No one could seem to decide what the church priorities should be," 
recalled Ruth McCreath, until recently the church's coordinator for 
planning and resources. 

 So In 1992 Ms. McCreath and her staff arranged for about 500 church 
members to gather for an open-space meeting in the ballroom of the Westin 
Hotel near O'Hare Airport. One by one, topics were written on the board - 
redevelopment of local congregations, survival of small churches, ending 
discrimination against gays and lesbians, defining a mission to the 
Muslim world. There were 143 topics in all, resulting in 349 pages of raw 
reports and 250 pages of edited ones. 

 The church has acted on many of those reports. It has gotten different 
presbyteries, or regions, to cooperate on such things as bundling 
services like insurance. It has set up spiritual retreats. It is setting 
up ministries in inner cities. 

 "it used to be that If you didn't get something on the agenda in 
advance, it never got discussed," Ms. McCreath recalled. "This way, 
everything got discussed, and finally acted on."