Birgitt Bolton 
 

A Canadian social services organization incorporates Open Space into its 
culture and thrives. 
 

For ten years, I was CEO of a Canadian social services organization. I 
had been in this position for six years before I was trained in Open 
Space Technology by its creator, Harrison Owen. Following my training, I 
held a three-day strategic planning meeting using Open Space. 

 About 100 staff gathered in a circle with no preplanned agenda and 
experienced the normal angst of moving into something that felt very 
different. Added to the anxiety was some trepidation about what my agenda 
as their CEO was, compounded by the fact that I was leading the meeting 
myself rather than having a facilitator do so. To their credit, they gave 
me the benefit of the doubt and assumed that my intentions were good. 

 The meeting was highly successful, bringing forward many critical 
business issues and opportunities that needed immediate attention as we 
moved toward our preferred future. 
 

Monthly Open Space Meetings 
 

As a next step, it seemed logical to hold a series of Open Space meetings 
once a month to deal with issues and opportunities that affected the 
whole organization. Each meeting was scheduled for a three-hour time slot 
because we couldn't spare more time away from our other work. 

 The first session focused on our concerns about communication. (I have 
since found this is common in other organizations.) It produced readily 
implementable creative solutions that did not require additional 
resources and were acted upon immediately. The second meeting focused on 
our resource development program. Resource Development was responsible 
for raising $2 million annually. Most conflict within the organization 
was between the re source development team and the teams responsible for 
direct customer service. The staff of Resource Development was surprised 
to learn that the rest of the organization was interested in what they 
were doing. There was a real buy-in to having resource development and 
public relations be everyone's responsibility, whether it was in an 
individual's job description or not. Furthermore, exceptionally good 
ideas were proposed. Their implementation led to unprecedented success 
for us during a recessionary year in which other charities did not meet 
their fundraising goals. 
 

A Shift 
 

I felt "blown away" by what was happening in the organization on a daily 
basis -high productivity, high creativity, terrific staff morale. I 
wanted to sustain the level of what was happening, and I wanted more. I 
understood that the change had something to do with our Open Space 
meetings, but I didn't know quite what it was. 

 Then there was a shift in what I was experiencing. On a personal level, 
I was finding that too many proposals for too many things were coming in 
at once. I felt as though the organization were "getting away from me" 
and that I no longer had a handle on everything that was happening. 
Somehow my job felt different. About three months after our first Open 
Space meeting, the staff and I clashed badly. It seemed as if my belief 
in what we could be and what we could achieve was disappearing. 

 But we were able to work at what was going wrong because we had achieved 
such a high level of operating together. And the solution came, along 
with a major insight about an ingredient essential to this type of 
organization. We realized that we needed to agree upon the "the givens" 
of the organization, the non-negotiables defined by our organizational 
structure, our governance policies, our budget allocations, and so on. A 
great deal of effort was expended to reduce the list of givens to its 
simplest form. For example, our organizational structure was a given, but 
it was not a given that it must remain a hierarchy. Once we had agreed on 
the givens, we collectively realized that everything else could be dealt 
with using Open Space principles as the means of working together. 
 

Leadership in All 
 

 We had a bulletin board where anyone could post an issue or opportunity 
at any time, and a process to determine whether an item would generate a 
special meeting or be worked on during a regular staff meeting. The 
person who put the topic up offered leadership to see it through. 

 The corporate culture changed, with everyone recognizing that leadership 
was in all, that all had a right to work at vision, that all had a role 
in the community, that all had responsibility for good management. The 
Law of Two Feet also applied. People used it to keep themselves only in 
situations in which they were contributing or receiving, so that no time 
was wasted by anyone in meetings. Conflict was minimized as people 
learned to let go of their agendas by living their organizational life 
using the Four Principles. 

 We maintained ourselves in this manner for almost four years. During 
that time we funded two new organizations, a large housing project and an 
inner city health center. We received a number of awards acknowledging 
our leadership and our excellence as an organization. When our client 
load doubled, so did productivity-with no added resources. Yet qualitv 
and creativity and staff morale continued to improve. We had in fact 
become and sustained ourselves as a high learning, high achieving, 
inspirited organization. We had uncovered a road map for getting there. 
 

The corporate culture changed, with everyone recognizing that leadership 
was in all, that all had a right to work at vision, that all had a role 
in the community, that all had responsibility for good management. 
 

Unfortunately, within the Province of Ontario there was a severe slashing 
of government funds to all nonprofit health and social agencies. In the 
process, our organization lost two-thirds of its funding, and we had to 
cease operations as we were. Most of the staff moved on to work 
elsewhere. The happy news for me in this is that many of the staff have 
taken our operating practices from Open Space Technology and have 
introduced them into their new places of work. They are influencing the 
way that their organizations are functioning, challenging them to a 
better way of being in organization together. 
 

Birgitt Bolton is an organizational learning consultant with Dalar 
Associates, Ancaster, Ontario. She can be reached at 905-648-5775 or 
birgitt@worldchat.com.