The skeptic in the room
A CEO once told me, flatly: this will never work without an agenda, we need structure or we’ll get chaos. I know that argument well. I’ve heard it at Scrum implementations, at Agile transformations, at attempts to build “self-managing teams,” and it is always the same story: an organization tries self-organization and ends up with more meetings, more coordination, more facilitators doing everything except letting go. Daniel Pink wrote in Drive about autonomy, mastery and purpose; Frederic Laloux in Reinventing Organizations about teal organizations; Sociocracy 3.0 has its own patterns for self-organization, and Management 3.0 adds its Moving Motivators to the mix. Every one of those models circles back to the same conditions: a clear goal, boundaries that give the self-organization a container, autonomy, and people who are motivated to get better at what they do. Take any of those away, or have leadership impose self-organization without modelling it themselves, and it simply doesn’t work. All of it valuable, and still I watch organizations struggle with the same question: how do you let go of control without getting chaos in return?
I looked for that answer myself, and I did not come to believe in Open Space because it sounded good on paper. I came to believe it because I saw it work, in business, in non-profit, in situations where the outcome actually mattered.
What the proceedings show
An analysis of 22 proceeding documents spanning 1994 to 2025 shows that the Open Space community has talked about self-organization as a natural phenomenon, not a management technique, since the very beginning. In 1996, Open Space was described as “a biological Self-Organizing System” [OS96]: not a meeting method, not a workshop format, but something that already exists in nature and only needs uncovering. Harrison Owen put it plainly in 1997: “Open Space is already here; our job is to uncover it” [OS97]. That is the whole difference. I don’t have to build anything or force anything. I only have to create the space where it can already happen. By 2006 the community had a name for the pattern, “emergent organization” [OS06]: organizations that arise from interaction rather than from planning.
Traffic, an example anyone can check for themselves
The analogy I reach for with skeptics is traffic on the ring road around Brussels, or Amsterdam, or any city you like. Nobody coordinates it. There is no central controller steering every car, no plan telling one driver to move left and another to brake. And yet it works: millions of decisions an hour, drivers setting their own speed, choosing their own lane, timing their own exit, mostly without a single accident. There are rules, of course (something like a speed limit standing in for the law of two feet), and conditions (lane markings, signs), but within that frame the system organizes itself, because every driver has their own destination, every driver responds to the cars right around them, and the whole system corrects itself as it goes: jams dissolve, open road speeds up, with no central plan required for any single decision. That is self-organization. Not utopia, not a hippie ideal. Just traffic.
The biological parallel
The proceedings keep returning to biological systems, and for good reason. A forest is not designed. Nobody plants every tree in its right spot, nobody draws up a schedule for growth, and yet an ecosystem forms anyway: relations between species, food chains, a balance that repairs itself. A tree dies here and there, a new species moves in, a clearing opens and pulls in new life. Your own body does the same thing. You never have to think about your heartbeat, your breathing, your digestion; millions of cells coordinate without any central plan, and somehow it all keeps functioning.
The real question is not whether self-organization works. It is why anyone would expect a Scrum board or an Agile coach to do it better.
Scrum, Agile, Sociocracy 3.0: why they often fail
I have watched organizations roll out “Agile” and end up with more bureaucracy than they started with. The problem is that they try to force self-organization into existence, with stand-ups, with retrospectives, with S3 patterns they “implement.” You cannot implement self-organization. You can only allow it. Scrum has good elements, S3 has valuable patterns, but they get used as a substitute for trust more often than as a tool for it. Daniel Pink writes about autonomy as a driver, but autonomy means letting go, not letting go plus a set of extra meetings to coordinate the letting go. The difference sits in the sentence each approach reaches for: Agile, Scrum and S3 say “we organize self-management through this structure,” Open Space says “I create the conditions and trust the self-organization that follows.” The first is a method. The second is a mindset.
What I have seen, in business and non-profit
I won’t claim it always works. That would be a lie.
I once had the boundary conditions only half in place myself, and I felt it immediately. At an Open Space for a government body, and separately at a private company, the sponsor was not willing to hand over full autonomy. So a handful of people got quietly lined up in advance to pitch a session, as a kind of backup, as an example, hoping others from the floor would follow their lead. That is exactly the sign that the conditions are not fully there yet: it tends to happen when people are new to the format, or already embedded in a culture of fixed meetings with fixed agendas, and have not yet met that particular kind of autonomy. The principles can be freeing, but nobody should expect everything to shift the first time. That is a growth process for the people in the room, something you build by running Open Space again and showing what it can do, not by declaring the principles sacred, but by simply keeping at it.
It worked with a non-profit wrestling with its strategy: what would normally have taken months of planning became three hours, forty people, and clear priorities, not because it was magic, but because the right people found each other. That was a foundation that itself supports non-profits, in finance; I am leaving the names out on purpose. In 2016 it worked the same way at a creative media company: not hours of meetings, just an afternoon where the right conversations found their own way.
It worked in 2021 at a banking company that wanted to innovate: no idea-generation sessions with sticky notes, just the question of what people wanted to discuss, and the best ideas came from people who normally never spoke up. In 2025 it worked with a Belgian foundation whose members were spread across the country: no difficult consensus procedures, just whoever showed up discussing what actually mattered, and the outcomes were clearer than months of meetings had produced.
It worked less well with an organization running it because management said so: there was no real urgency, people went through the motions without their hearts in it. And it worked less well when a facilitator steered too hard: the principles got half-applied, and what came out was forced spontaneity rather than the real thing.
It does not work at all if you already know the outcome you want and are just going through the motions, if you value control more than the result, or if you are not willing to be surprised.
The difficult truth
What I have learned is that self-organization is not easier than top-down. It is just different. Top-down asks a lot of work from the top: planning, coordinating, controlling. Self-organization asks a lot of work in the preparation: building the right space, inviting the right people, setting the right intention. It is shifted work, not less work. But what comes out is different too. You get ownership instead of compliance, creativity instead of execution, engagement instead of mere attendance. That, based on the proceedings and on my own experience in business and non-profit, is why organizations that try this rarely want to go back.
A small experiment for this week
You don’t need to run an Open Space to feel any of this. Go stand at a busy intersection, safely, and watch the traffic. Can you see the self-organization? Can you see how people respond to each other with no central plan at all? Or try it at work: next time you’re talking with your team, ask what you would all do if there were no meetings scheduled, if you simply started. Notice what happens in the first thirty seconds of silence, who speaks first (often not the usual person), which topics surface that never make it onto the regular agenda, and how all of that feels. That feeling, the mix of tension and possibility, is where self-organization begins.
No hype, just work
I am not a fan of “transformation,” “disruption,” or big words for a simple shift. I talk about what works and what doesn’t: about traffic, about forests, about bodies that have been self-organizing for thousands of years without an Agile coach in sight. The four principles of Open Space are not hype. They have stayed unchanged for thirty years because they describe something that already works. You don’t have to believe it. You only have to allow it.
And then something happens.
I help organizations, business and non-profit, let go of control without chaos, drawing on thirty years of Open Space proceedings and my own experience in the field.
This article draws on an analysis of 22 World Open Space on Open Space proceeding documents (1994-2025), specifically OS96, OS97 and OS06 for the biological parallels.
“Don’t push the river, it flows by itself.” A line from WOSonOS 2011 that sums up the difference between forcing and allowing.