The skeptic in the room

I hear this reaction often: “This will never work without an agenda. We need structure, or we’ll get chaos.” I know the argument well. I’ve heard it at Scrum implementations, at Agile transformations, at attempts to build “self-managing teams.” The story is always the same: 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 described teal organizations in Reinventing 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 want 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 is valuable. And still I watch organizations get stuck on the same question: how do you let go of control without getting chaos in return?

I looked for that answer myself. I did not come to believe in Open Space because it sounded good on paper, but because I saw it work: in business, in non-profit, in situations where the outcome actually mattered.

The four principles

These are the four sentences Open Space stands on, while management methods come and go: Six Sigma, Holacracy, agile-washing.

These are not management tricks. They describe how self-organization already works: people decide for themselves where to put their energy, good ideas draw attention, and weaker ideas fade because people use the Law of Mobility. Timing comes out of the process, not a Gantt chart, and closure feels like completion, not “we had to stop.” There is no real choice between structure and freedom here: the principles give you structure themselves, just not the kind you would draw on an org chart.

I went through the proceedings of World Open Space on Open Space myself (1994-2025), with AI support for searching and clustering. What comes out of that is remarkable: these four principles have not changed in thirty years. [Source: OS99, OS05, OS08, VOS15, WOS25].

I saw this confirmed again at WOSonOS 2026 in Eindhoven: give people room, and they arrive at better ideas than anything I could have planned for them in advance. No agenda forcing that, just people gathering with a real drive to change something.

What the proceedings show

Reading the proceedings of Open Space on Open Space since 1994 shows that the Open Space community has described self-organization as a natural phenomenon, not a management technique, since the very beginning. The proceedings don’t frame Open Space as a meeting method or a workshop format. They describe it as something that already exists in nature, something that only needs uncovering. 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 1999 it was already a session topic on the board, “emergent organization” [OS99]: organizations that arise from interaction rather than from planning.

“A lot of energy is lost because of control.”From the proceedings of World Open Space on Open Space, Bilbao 2022

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 steers every car individually, and yet it works: millions of decisions an hour, drivers setting their own speed, choosing when to change lanes and when to exit, mostly without a single accident.

Take away the rules, the lane markings, the clear signs, and any intersection turns into chaos. The rules do not tell you where to drive; they make it possible for everyone to choose their own way. An Open Space works the same way: the givens, the principles and the Law of Mobility are fixed, and precisely because of that the rest can organize itself. Traffic does not work despite the rules. It works because of them. Self-organization works the same way.

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.

You already do this at home

Here is an example. At home, I do not organize a family gathering with a project plan: come at seven, bring something good, we will see where the evening takes us. People talk, ideas surface, someone starts singing, someone else clears up without being asked.

At work, I often act as if that is impossible, as if adults suddenly cannot take responsibility anymore, as if a meeting is needed to discuss when the next meeting should be. Give people time and space, and they find their own way there. That is not naive hippie idealism. It is the same self-organization as the traffic and the forest, just at your own kitchen table.

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.

Why letting go feels frightening

Letting go of control asks for leadership, not the kind that plans and controls everything, the kind that dares to trust and dares to let go. A PowerPoint about “agile transformation” or “self-managing teams” will not convince anyone. What it asks for is different: living the principles myself, daring to say: I don’t know where this leads, I trust the process anyway. That is frightening. It feels exposed. And that is also why it works.

I have clung to an agenda myself, out of fear of letting go. That happens when a client says: this is not enough for me, I expect clear results. In that moment a facilitator needs to stand firm and say the process will simply be followed as it unfolds. That firmness does not come from the Open Space itself, it comes from the preparation. If I have not clearly set the givens with the client beforehand, that doubt inevitably comes back during the session itself.

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 givens 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. You don’t declare the principles sacred. You just keep at it.

A non-profit was wrestling with its strategy. What would normally have taken months of planning became three hours, forty people, and clear priorities: the right people found each other, not because anything magical happened. It was a foundation that itself supports non-profits, in finance; I am leaving the names out on purpose.

Something similar happened in 2016 at a creative media company: not hours of meetings, just one afternoon where the right conversations found their own way.

At a bank in 2021, management wanted to innovate. There were no sticky notes and no idea-generation sessions, just the question of what people wanted to discuss. The best ideas came from people who normally never spoke up.

In 2025 there was a Belgian foundation with members spread across the country. No difficult consensus procedures: whoever showed up discussed what actually mattered, and the outcomes were clearer than months of meetings had produced.

Twice it worked less well. At an organization running it because management said so, real urgency was missing: people went through the motions without their hearts in it. And at a session where the facilitator steered too hard, the principles got half-applied. What came out was forced spontaneity.

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.

Who this works for

These principles do not work everywhere. They work when there is a real drive behind the gathering, not “management told us to,” when the conditions are right (room, time, safety), and when leadership dares to trust.

I see it often with leaders who want to let go without losing control: transformation leads who can feel the old approach no longer holds. And I see it with foundations, associations and non-profits trying to do more with less, with members who are already motivated on their own. It works in companies too, but only once you stop managing change and start hosting it.

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. What you get back for it is different: people who treat the problem as their own, instead of merely working through it. You feel that difference right away. That, based on the proceedings and on my own experience in business and non-profit, is why organizations that try this once rarely go back to the old approach.

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 how people respond to each other without anyone steering them, and how the traffic lights and the right-of-way rules make that possible? Or try it at work. Next time you meet with your team, agree the rules of the game first: the question you are there for and what has already been decided. Leave the rest open, with no agenda, and simply start. Notice what happens in the first thirty seconds of silence, who speaks first (often not the usual person), and which topics surface that never make it onto the regular agenda. That mix of tension and possibility, within clear boundaries, is where self-organization begins.

Or smaller still: watch your own reaction the next time something does not go as planned. Panic, irritation, curiosity, all three tell you something about how much room you actually give to self-organization.

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.

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 the proceedings of Open Space on Open Space since 1994. They are all online at openspaceworld.org.

“Don’t push the river, it flows by itself.” The title of a 1970 book by Barry Stevens that sums up the difference between forcing and allowing.