Organizational Learning with Open Space

Abstract

A successful Agile adoption requires ongoing engagement from everyone involved, including team members, managers and executive leadership. Social systems are complex adaptive systems that generate complicated and non-linear feedback. Engagement is an emergent property of social systems, and essential for effective and lasting Agile adoptions. This property does decay quickly, often resulting in poor results in Agile adoption efforts. This paper introduces Open Space as a tool that functions as a "event" with a "good game" structure for creating rapid, effective and lasting Agile adoptions. Actual experience using Open Space in Agile adoptions is discussed, including lessons learned. NOTE: It is assumed the reader is already familiar with the Open Space meeting format; if not, you may examine http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-space_technology for details and additional links.