ORIGINS OF OPEN SPACE TECHNOLOGY

Back in 1982 a number of consultants met at an organisation development conference in the USA and discovered that they were all using the phrase Organisation Transformation (OT) to describe their work. They decided to hold the first 'international symposium on OT' the following year. Harrison Owen was a member of the organising team. 250 people from across the US turned up for the conference, which was a major success. The team had invited great speakers, arranged great workshops, booked a great venue and run a tight ship. But afterwards people said that the most useful bits had been the coffee breaks - the only parts the team had not actually organised.

The conference became known as OT1, and OT2 happened the following year, organised by a different group of people but along the same lines and with similar results. Responsibility for OT3 was taken up by Owen and, remembering that OT1 had taken a full year to organise, he was determined to find a more efficient way of planning an event of this size and complexity. And he wanted to combine the self-organising nature of the coffee breaks with the productivity of the more successful kind of meeting.

Open Space Technology was the result, and has formed the basis of the OT conferences every year since, right up to OT15 in 1997. Thanks to Harrison Owen's pioneering work the method is now being used by an ever growing number of organisations throughout the world.