Why does Open Space work? - I don't think it has much to do with the Four principles or The Law of Two Feet. In fact, The Principles and The Law appear to function more descriptively than prescriptively. In other words, and as strange as it may sound, both the principles and the law simply acknowledge what people are going to do anyhow. If there is any substantive contribution derived from either principles or law, it is merely to eliminate all the guilt. After all, people are going to exercise the law of two feet, mentally if not physically, but now they do not have to feel badly about it. By the same token, meetings will start when they start, regardless of what the clock says - so why feel badly about it. Just get on with the business. Truthfully, the elimination of major pieces of guilt and blame can go a long way towards the enhancement of group function. But not far enough to explain the quantum jumps in productivity typically experienced in Open Space. Something else is going on.

That "something else" is, I believe, self-organization. Ever since Meg Wheatley published Leadership and the New Science, excitement around self organization and complexity has been building. One of the oddest manifestations of this emergent interest is the number of people who have apparently dedicated themselves to the organization of self-organization. I think there is something wrong with this picture. Either there is such a thing as self organization in which case, why bother. Or there isn't - and why bother.

I have a growing, perhaps nagging, suspicion that there is no such thing as a non-self-organizing system, at least in the natural world, which would include us. Should this be true, then much of what we are currently doing under the heading of "getting organized" is rather a waste of time, and the potential implications are fairly mind-boggling. Regardless of the accuracy of my nagging suspicion, I feel quite confident that the phenomenon of self-organization lies at the heart of Open Space.

One of the more significant players in the growing field of self-organizing systems, also known as Complex Adaptive Systems, is Stuart Kaufmann. Kaufmann is a member of the Santa Fe Institute and a biologist by training and profession. He has set for himself the modest task of figuring how life may have emerged from a rich stew of molecules, way back when. The details are contained in his 1995 book, At Home in the Universe (Oxford). Admittedly, he is a biologist, working with biological systems, and therefore somewhat removed from the realm of human systems. I am by no means sufficiently expert to judge the validity of his findings, although his colleagues seem to take him quite seriously. In any event, scattered amongst some very esoteric biology and interesting mathematics are what I take to be Kaufmann's understanding of the essential pre-conditions for self-organization. Nowhere does he state them exactly as I will, but I do think I have the flavor.