Meeting Planner Runs on Chaos : Trends: An expert in organizational behavior gets results with a laid-back approach to problem-solving. His clients are delighted.
No one’s in charge. There is no structure, no agenda, no planned content.
Posted on the wall are two hand-drawn signs. One reads simply, “The Law of Two Feet” and shows a crude rendition of two footprints. The other lists four principles that clarify nothing: “Whoever comes is the right people”; “Whatever happens is the only thing that could have”; “Whenever it starts is the right time”; “When it’s over it’s over.”
Whether what happened in Ballroom C at a suburban Virginia hotel one recent morning was the only thing that could have happened is debatable. That it was the strangest conference 50 senior administrators of the U.S. Forest Service have ever attended, no one is debating.
“The most puckered, tight hierarchy in Washington” is how one Forest Service participant described the gathered bureaucrats as they milled about, sipping coffee, rechecking watches, waiting for the meeting to begin.
They seated themselves in folding chairs arranged in a large circle. With their arms crossing their chests in classic defensive posture, they looked at the ceiling, looked at each other. All they knew was that they were scheduled to be there all day.
“You never know what’s going to happen,” Harrison Owen says as an aside before he steps to the center of the circled administrators to get things started.
Unlike most experts in organizational behavior, Owen thrives on ambiguity and believes that, in the right circumstances, workplaces do too. His theories fly in the face of business as usual.
While others try to boost productivity by reorganizing and controlling, he dabbles in chaos, promoting it as a potent creative force. Others focus on the nitty-gritty of organization; he tunes in to the spirit.
Calling his work “organizational transformation,” Owen has applied his innovations at major corporations on five continents, as well as with small tribal villages in West Africa, personnel managers in India and polymer chemists at Du Pont.
No matter who the audience, skepticism always greets his offbeat approach. He expected nothing less from the forestry managers toward the largely leaderless and formless meeting he calls open space technology.
“Every single group I have ever worked with has told me upfront it’s a great idea but it will never work with them,” says Owen, president of H. H. Owen & Co., his consulting firm in Potomac, Md. “Groups that I think I could never get them to do it, like the senior executives for Pepsi-Cola in Venezuela, they take to it like ducks to water.”
Were it not for the savvy corporate execs and hard-core senior managers who attest to the effectiveness of open space technology, it might seem that Harrison Owen has hit upon a fat scam in a business world grasping desperately for new solutions. By his own estimate, he spends only about five minutes preparing for these one- to five-day conferences. His corporate rate runs about $2,000 a day (although he donated his services to the African village and to other promising causes).
He readily admits that once he gets a group moving in the right direction, he “goes and sits down the hall.” For the open space experience to work, he says, no one can take charge, including himself.
“That’s the big secret,” says Owen, whose credentials include being an Anglican priest and author of several management books. “I don’t do anything. There’s nothing to plan--just when is it going to be, and where and who’s coming. My major job is to get them to stop doing things. I have to tell them ‘Don’t worry, it’s going to happen.’ ”
What does happen isn’t predictable, nor is it easily defined. In a sense, open space technology is kind of the brainstorming version of the classic “Stone Soup” story: Owen’s minimal guidance is like the rock in a pot of boiling water, everyone else contributes their ideas to the soup, and in the end the group is well-fed.
“It’s like community Rorschach,” says Owen, referring to the highly interpretable ink-blot psychology test that is impossible to fail so long as one participates.
“The structure that will emerge will emerge as a response. My goal is that within an hour, we will have the whole agenda for the entire conference and the people to carry it out.”
For the first 15 minutes, the Forest Service managers listen soberly to Owen’s briefing. He assures them open space technology has worked before, often and sometimes brilliantly. There was the time the National Education Assn. sent 420 teachers, school-board members and administrators to Colorado to explore how to enhance education in America; in less than an hour they created 85 workshops and then ran the two-day conference themselves.
Last fall, the Forest Service’s travel-and-management division hosted 224 people representing 65 organizations--from the Sierra Club to timber companies to the National Nude Sunbathing Society--to meet on the issue of access to public land.
In less than an hour, they created 62 task forces and managed the conference themselves for two days. “About the only thing they had in common was the issue at hand and their antagonism for each other,” says Owen. “But by the end of the second day, we had available a 200-page report of their findings. The only complaint was that the report was too detailed to assimilate.”
If Owen has reinvented the meeting, he’s done it by recognizing that creativity abhors a vacuum. His instructions to the forestry managers are brief: Each is to think of an area or issue he or she is passionate about that relates to the conference’s theme (“Enhancing Relationships With Our Customers”), then title it, be prepared to take responsibility for it, step forward and write the title on a piece of poster paper and tack it to the wall.
The room buzzes with doubt and excitement. “Think of something which is important to you,” encourages Owen. “And if nothing pops up, don’t worry about it.”
One man rises reluctantly, states his name and issue and starts marking it on poster paper. Two more stand up, followed by a flurry of others. Squeaking felt-tip markers compete with voices announcing topics: “Consumption and Recycling,” “Whistleblowers: How Can We Be Known Again as an Honest Agency?” and “Multiculturalism.”
As sudden as it started, it stops. Buying time for late-blooming ideas, Owen “orchestrates the flow” of what will occur for the rest of the day: The posted topics are arranged in immediate, late morning and afternoon time slots and are designated locations. Anyone interested in an issue signs up and shows up. Those who originate the issue take notes of what goes on.
Thirty-two minutes into the conference, the forestry managers have created and scheduled 13 workshops. Owen sends them off, telling them only to report back later that afternoon.
“People say how do you get substantive results out of that?” Owen says afterward. “But the same people who would be sure there was no way anything useful could get done all of a sudden find themselves operating with absolutely no problems in a situation where leadership is constantly changing and structure is made and remade to fit the task at hand. Suddenly the barriers go down.”
Owen’s credo is “Structure happens.” As he told the Forest Service managers, “What we’re really talking about is inspired performance. Can you force inspired performance? You can evoke it. You can give space for it. You can train for it. You can hope for it. You can pray for it. But can you force it? No.”
Looking over the workshop choices, Paige Ballard says he’s never been to a meeting like this. “It sure seems to encourage creativity and free thought,” says the Forest Service’s recycling program manager. “It isn’t inhibiting about what we can talk about and who can talk about it. And everybody gravitates to what they’re comfortable with.”
Bill Delaney, the Forest Service’s branch chief for management improvement who has contracted with Owen for several such conferences with other Forest Service departments, believes the open space concept works especially well for the silent majority--most of the people in a bureaucracy who usually say the least. “It’s not for every meeting,” he says, “but it is certainly a way to get participative juices flowing.”
Owen designed open space technology seven years ago after a meeting with a group of organizational experts in Monterey, Calif. At the end, everyone confessed that they got more out of the coffee breaks than the meeting itself.
“So my question was, ‘Is there a way of producing the kind of good, intense interaction you get in a coffee break while achieving the output and performance you get in a meeting?’ ” he says.
“I was looking for a mechanism that was so simple that you could do it in a boardroom or in a Third-World village with the same results. When all is said and done, people really have the experience of open power. They are in charge--which is the reason the level of spirit and creativity are so high.”