Open Space and Agile::World will not be the same anymore

By Bachan Anand / Filed under Scrum / March 13th, 2010

An all day Open space facilitated by Harrison Owen provided a great wrap up to Orlando Scrum Gathering and I cannot think of a better way to get the participants and scrum community to “Scrumming Forward “. I have this strong belief that something powerful is going to happen from the outcome of Open Space, because 300 + people who are already passionate about self organization has found a deeper way to self organize.

Since closing of Gathering I have been involved in quite a few discussion on taking action based on discussion on Open space, some of the topics that have come out of open space are

Let’s grow Agile Community.
How to Implement Scrum Outside of IT to Non-Profits and Other Conscientious Organizations?
Taking Agile Beyond teams to CIO,CTO, Managers , Architects
Agile Exchange ( consider it similar to student exchange to innovate and collaborate between organizations)
Coaching Circles
Community support for growing CST/CSC.
Many more…..

One topic that intrigues me most and makes me say , the world is not going to be the same anymore is,

How to Implement Scrum Outside of IT to Non-Profits and Other Conscientious Organizations? Proposed by Claudia Alarcon

We had a very lengthy discussion today and we both strongly believe that the innate power of Open Space to self organize and Scrum/Aglie’s values and short execution cycle for prioritized backlog items can be effectively used to overcome world challenges like religious intolerance , hunger , improvements to education system to name a few. So what does Scrum add to Open Space, Scrum will help the Open Space backlog to be prioritized and broken down into smaller chunks that the world can focus on for a short period. We human beings always want to work through challenges , however because the problem is so big that we don’t know where to start, Scrum /Agile can solve this .Some people know where to start , hwoever they are waiting for the invitation and people to start, Open Space gives them that space.

Let me take an example to explain what I mean.

Let’s take an example and consider that we have 1000’s of Open space meetings occurring around the world with topic being “How to have fun at your work ” and everyone space comes up with a set of backlog items which the self organizing teams prioritizes ( the PO is everyone as it is about how to have fun at your work) . Now each of these teams around the world pulls items from their local backlog and commits to what the ycan deliver for the first sprint and then retrospect and continue work through the backlog until objective is met .Let’s take it to the next step , imagine the results if we take it to the next level, if we can use technology to have Open Space groups around the world have visibility into each other and collaborate and supporting each other all through self organization , all we need to provide is have a Vision , bring people to together and what we will see is that as the video on Open space says – “Nothing happens until somebody starts doing something “. I truly believe magic can happen. Maybe it is already happening , maybe Orlando was the beginning , I know for a fact that it will happen.

Here is a video from YouTube about Open Space and self organization.