The invitation is the design

The invitation decides whether an Open Space works. Make the question too broad and you get sessions about everything and agreements about nothing. Dress up a decision as a question and people see through it within the hour. Most of what goes wrong on the day was decided in the weeks before.

Why this is more work than the day itself

On the day, a facilitator holds back. He opens the space, explains how it works, and then gets out of the way. That is the whole craft, and it is less work than people assume.

What comes before is another matter. Sharpening the question, working out who needs to be there, and settling what happens with the outcomes afterwards. That is where most of the time goes, and where it is decided whether the day produces anything.

A theme is not an agenda item

"The future of our organisation" is not an invitation. It is a category. Nobody walks in feeling that something is at stake.

An invitation that works describes a tension: something is different from how it should be, people feel it, and nobody can resolve it alone. That tension is the engine. Without it the board stays half empty, or fills up with topics people were discussing anyway.

How to find that tension

Three questions usually get you there:

Why does this need attention now, rather than last year or next year? Who experiences this as a problem, and do those people notice it themselves? And what happens if nobody does anything?

That last question is the most useful. If the answer is "nothing much", you do not need an Open Space but an announcement. If the answer is uncomfortable, you have an invitation.

Inviting is not the same as requiring

Someone who is in the room under obligation will not put a session on the board. That is not obstinacy but logic: you do not stick your neck out for a day you did not choose.

Daniel Mezick worked this out under the name OpenSpace Agility, starting from the principle that mandates lower engagement and invitations raise it. Inviting people freely inside an organisation feels risky, because perhaps nobody comes. In practice a smaller group that wants to be there is worth more than a full room that had to.

What else belongs in the invitation

Alongside the question itself, three things people want to know before saying yes.

Who else will be there. An Open Space becomes interesting because of who is in the room; you are allowed to say so.

What happens with the outcomes. Who reads the harvest, and what is the next step.

Who decides afterwards. This is the question most often missing, and the one that earns most trust. A group that knows someone will act on the outcomes talks differently from a group that suspects it ends in a report.

Four invitations that do not work

The invitation whose answer is already known. Leadership has decided and the day exists to bring people along. Participants notice within an hour, and you lose more trust than a straightforward presentation would have cost.

The invitation without tension. Neatly worded, broad enough to offend nobody, and therefore without pull. Risk nothing in the question and you get nothing back in the room.

The invitation that wants two things at once. Knowledge transfer and self-organisation in a single day. It becomes a programme with an Open Space attached, and participants can feel which part is real.

The invitation nobody read. Sent through the calendar invite, three lines, no context. People then arrive without knowing why, and the first twenty minutes of the day go on explanation that should have happened beforehand.

Practical

Michael Herman, one of the stewards of the international Open Space community, published a template for writing invitations. It sits with the facilitator resources at openspaceworld.org. Useful as a checklist, even if you are not facilitating the day yourself.

What I do with this

On an engagement, most of my preparation goes into this question. Not because it is the most enjoyable step, but because it is the only one you cannot repair later.