It Always Works (The Price of Real Self-Organization)

Definition

Owen claims Open Space Technology "always seems to work," but immediately qualifies what that means: it reliably produces creative, synergistic, self-motivated behavior from a group — it does not reliably produce the specific outcome any given sponsor wanted. Because the process genuinely hands control to participants rather than simulating that handoff, sponsors who expected self-organization while secretly wanting a predetermined result experience the same mechanism as a success by the process's own standard and a failure by theirs.

In the Book

The clearest evidence for this is a Fortune 25 corporation's pilot of Open Space for new-employee orientation, told in Chapter II. Sixty-five people — two-thirds new hires — used the process, and afterward Owen asked everyone for one word describing the day. New hires answered "exciting, energizing, stimulating, liberating, collegial." Senior staff, asked the same question, answered "terrible, unsettling, out of control, confusing, worst day I have ever spent." One senior participant then made the point Owen builds the whole concept around: the day genuinely was awful for him, but Open Space "had done everything exactly as advertised" — his problem was that he felt out of control, and he didn't like that. The corporation declined to adopt the process, "but not because it had failed to work."

Why It Matters

This separates two questions that get conflated whenever an organization considers a genuinely bottom-up process: "does this mechanism work?" and "will I like what it produces?" A process can pass the first test and fail the second, and the failure isn't a design flaw — it's evidence the mechanism was real. Anyone evaluating a proposal to decentralize control (a market, a democratic vote, an open contribution model) needs this distinction to avoid mistaking discomfort with losing control for evidence that the mechanism itself is broken.