The essential preconditions are:

1. A relatively safe nutrient environment.
2. High levels of diversity and complexity in terms of the elements to be self-organized.
3. Living at the edge of chaos, in a word nothing will happen if everything is sitting like a lump.
4. An inner drive towards improvement, hence if you are an atom it would be useful to get together with another atom to become a molecule.
5. Sparsity of connections This one is a little hard to visualize and was a real surprise to me. Kaufmann is suggesting that self-organization will only occur if there are few prior connections between the elements, indeed he says no more than two. In retrospect, it seems to make sense. If everything is hardwired in advance how could it self organize?

Kaufmann's preconditions for self organization in no way prove that Open Space works. But there is no need for that as people all over the world, in thousands of situations, know that it works. Indeed the fact that it works seems to be the problem, eliciting the natural question, why? It is in answer to that question that I find Kaufmann's observations most intriguing.

The intrigue derives in part from the similarity of what Kaufmann is saying and what I have said for almost a dozen years when asked what are the appropriate conditions for using Open Space. My answer has been: Open Space is appropriate in any situation where there is a real business issue to be solved marked by High levels of complexity, in terms of the issues to be resolved, High levels of Diversity in terms of the people needed to solve it, High levels of conflict (potential or actual), and there is a Decision time of yesterday. Given these conditions, Open space is not only appropriate, but always seems to work.