Tag: GoodBooks

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Rules for Ongoing Open Space

This must be my most frequently shared bit of OS practice guidance. These rules were developed at University of Kentucky Rural Medical Center and reported by Lloyd Kepferle in Harrison Owen’s Tales from Open Space (pdf).

They are a good reminder that Open Space is not just way to have better meetings, or even better organizations. It’s a better way to BE IN organization with others, if we will make the sort of simple shifts suggested here.

In the last 20 years, especially in pandemic time, they’ve become less strange than when they were first written.

Eliminate constraints on the following:

  • Who can call a meeting.
  • The type of problem or opportunity that is being addressed.
  • The availability of time to have a meeting.
  • Who may attend a meeting.
  • The availability of information necessary for a group to work.

Personal empowerment is constrained by the following:

  • When a problem or opportunity is to be discussed, there must be wide notification of the meeting time and place so that anyone who is interested can attend.
  • Proposed solutions/ideas must be broadcast widely so that they can be acknowledged as organizational policies, programs, or procedures, or, if they are contradictory to organizational rules, another solution can be sought.
  • Proposed solution cannot be hurtful to anyone else.
  • Proposed solutions should channel limited resources so that they have maximum impact on achieving organizational goals.
  • Accomplishing the work for which people were hired takes precedence over the group work. However, if the right people (those who really care) are involved in any topic, they will find a way to make sure their work is completed and the work of the group is brought to a successful conclusion.

Through these simple (ongoing) practices and procedures, any ordinary organization can transcend (not replace) its old ways of being and include and embody (more fully and consciously) this thing we call Open Space.

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Inviting Agility at Walmart

This is a great story from Todd Kromann, Agile Coach at Walmart, and part of my contribution to BOSSA Nova: Company-wide Agility with Beyond Budgeting, Open Space & Sociocracy, by Jutta Eckstein and John Buck.

A tiny cohort of four agile coaches was able to invite thousands of IT employees and contractors at Walmart to shift the organization’s work from 10% agile to 90% agile in less than two years. We simply invited the people doing the work into Open Space, in more than 30 one-day events, hundreds at a time.

We didn’t impose a methodology, a tool or a metric. We offered invitation, autonomy, and options. We asked everyone to find ways to make their work more agile. That was the purpose and all the ideas went up on the wall, completely open and transparent. As the work took off, “Agile Champions” helped the four coaches spread the invitation and the results.

Formally, the business adopted agile concepts such as founder’s mentality, design thinking and Team of Teams. These were promoted from the CEO level and the IT coaches had little involvement. Walmart has several agile ‘thought leaders’ on it’s board of directors and they contributed to the net effect.

Because this was very open, the story is hard to define. The scope could be as low as 4000 or into the 10’s of thousands depending on who you ask. The Bentonville business depart- ments were included (it was open) and business folks usually opted to attend.

Today, I get reference checks for Agile coaches from Walmart, and these are often people I’ve never met. Any of our cham- pions claim that title. I think that’s a side effect of an open transformation. So, the concept of 4 coaches is only correct in the narrow sense of 4 people whose full time job was coaching. By the end we scaled up to 6 full time coaches in Bentonville and perhaps a dozen worldwide. This was federated so, again, it’s hard to define.

While the numbers are hard to pin down, the net effect is not. We are now 100% agile in that it’s more awkward to opt out than to opt in. We no longer have any Agile coaches. If you ask anyone at Walmart how we became agile, they will likely say they did it by themselves 😉 An open transformation is like an avalanche. It just takes a few snowballs and after that, it’s chaos.

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Inviting Agility to Address Adaptive Challenges

This is part of my contribution to BOSSA Nova: Company-wide Agility with Beyond Budgeting, Open Space & Sociocracy, by Jutta Eckstein and John Buck.

Some years ago, the managers running a 900-person gasoline delivery logistics unit invited into Open Space more than one hundred of their colleagues, representing a wide variety of functions and levels, with this simple email message:

Your palms are sweating, everything looks more and more complex. You are being asked to do more with less and you cannot see the light at the end of the tunnel. You feel like the chaos is catching up with you… Does this sound familiar?

A more adaptive focus, as opposed to today’s purely operational approach, needs to emerge from within [the division] to enable a sustainable performance advantage so that we remain on the edge of chaos, this sweet spot for productive change, where order and disorder flow with discipline.

Please join us in investigating together what this sweet spot would look and feel like at [place/hotel] on [two and a half days]…

 
This language sprung from a book on “adaptive challenges.” These were not just big, complex issues, they were questions that they’d never seen before, essential shifts that needed to be navigated for the first time. After a year of study and discussion, the managers had wrestled the unit’s future into a list of 12 or 15 of these challenges. Now they were ready to invite the rest of the organization to try to solve them.

The night before the program started, we seriously debated whether or not the managers’ list of adaptive challenges should be announced at the opening. I counseled against this, and finally they agreed. As soon as the agenda was created and the breakout sessions started, the managers all pulled their lists out of their back pockets to check the work of the group. Sure enough, to their great amazement and relief, ALL of their “adaptive challenges” were detailed there, in the dozens of issues posted on the wall.

The next day at our Morning News plenary check-in, a big upset bubbled out. There was a growing sense of doubt and frustration. One man put it something like this, “I think we are failing here. I’ve talked with other people and none of this stuff (on the wall) makes our palms sweat or keeps us up at night. I think we’re not doing what we came here to do!” Many others agreed, but didn’t know what to do.

After more than an hour of difficult conversation in the big circle, the group came to understand and start to believe that they were doing and addressing everything the managers had hoped and envisioned, exactly what the organization needed to move forward. What the managers saw as the biggest strategic challenges and threats, everyone else experienced as simply “the stuff we work to solve every day.”

By the end of their meeting, all of the most important issues (for managers and everyone else, it turns out) were identified, discussed, documented and on the morning of day three were prioritized by the whole group, by voting. This self-organizing team of more than 100 people produced a prioritized “backlog” that everyone understood and was ready to go to work on, together.