Preface

THIS BOOK COMPLETES the Open Space Quartet. Expanding Our Now introduces Open Space Technology. Open Space Technology: A User’s Guide provides the essential “how to” information. The Spirit of Leadership explores the nature and function of leadership in an open space environment, where control as we used to know it has ceased to exist. This present book completes the story by providing the critical link between a meeting methodology and a very new way of being in organization.

All of these books, with the exception of Expanding Our Now, had a previous life with Abbott Publishing. Thanks to Steve Piersanti and the good people at Berrett-Koehler, they are now available to a much broader audience, usually with major revision and additions. This book is no exception, and while some of the thoughts and words began life in my earlier books (Spirit: Transformation and Development in Organizations, Riding the Tiger, The Millennium Organization, and Tales from Open Space), this is not simply a rehash of what has gone before. There is much new material and new ways of looking at older ideas. My intent is to offer a distillation of 40 years of thinking about and working in organizations of all sorts.

Harrison Owen
Potomac, Maryland
June 2000