Is Open Space right for your question?

Not every challenge calls for Open Space. This page helps you choose: when the form fits, when I advise against it, and when World Café or Conversation Café works better.

When Open Space fits

Open Space works well for complex challenges with many stakeholders and no ready-made answer. In Open Space Technology: A User's Guide, Harrison Owen devotes his second chapter to what he calls the most important question: should you do it at all? His answer is that Open Space is not appropriate everywhere. He names four conditions under which the form works best: high complexity, many different perspectives, conflict that exists or threatens, and urgency.

If one of those four is missing, there is usually a better instrument.

When I advise against it

The outcome is already decided. If the decision has been made and the gathering exists to build support for it, Open Space is risky. Participants notice within an hour that their agenda does not count, and you lose more trust than a straightforward presentation would have cost. That is why I clarify with the client beforehand what is truly still open within the session, and what is not, regardless of what comes up on the day itself.

The group is too small. Below fifteen to twenty participants there are too few people for parallel sessions. A dialogue format works better. For a conversation that needs depth I use Conversation Café, sometimes as a run-up to an Open Space later in the programme.

Knowledge has to be transferred. If the group needs to learn something already known outside the room, Open Space is a detour. A good speaker with room for questions is faster.

A decision has to be made. Open Space produces a harvest: everything participants wrote down themselves. If a choice has to be made by the end of the day, you need a decision method alongside it. Consent-based decision-making works well here, or structured prioritisation.

The critique from within

The most useful critique of Open Space comes from facilitators rather than sceptics. In 2017 a sharp piece from within the community described the tyranny of Open Space. It is explicitly not a call to stop using the form, but a call to stop overusing it.

The diagnosis: the urge to tear down structures often leads to them not being replaced by anything. In that void the same problems reappear, now with a layer of smugness over them.

The piece describes patterns every facilitator recognises. The session host getting their rejected conference proposal in anyway. The session where novices advise each other badly. The consultant who hijacks the room. The quiet session where everyone waits for someone else's wisdom.

The central point matters most. Open Space solves a problem at the level of the whole group and offers nothing for what happens inside the individual sessions. That is a real lacuna. It is why I always discuss in preparation how the conversations themselves will take shape. For microstructure inside sessions I use Liberating Structures, a separate craft with its own site.

When another form fits better

None of the four situations above apply to your question, but you're still torn between forms? Group size and who sets the agenda are the two quickest ways to tell them apart.

For groups under twenty I usually choose Conversation Café. Sometimes as a run-up to an Open Space later on: first understand together what's going on, then get to work self-organising.

Conversation Café started in the summer of 2001 in Seattle. The form is simple: a small circle, a talking object, a few rounds, ninety minutes. Whoever later took over stewardship came from the Open Space tradition themselves, which explains why the two forms fit together so well.

For a fuller treatment of this choice: Choosing Open Space Technology, on openspaceworld.org.

What I do instead

If none of these forms fit your challenge, I say so during the exploratory conversation, usually within the first fifteen minutes. Often another facilitation format does fit, and you can reach me for that via workshopfacilitation.eu. Sometimes the answer is that you do not need a facilitator but a decision or a consultant.

Does Open Space fit your challenge? See also: what an Open Space actually produces.