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HOW TO DESIGN AN “UNCONFERENCE”
 I’m looking to shake up our annual franchisee convention and have been reading about the “unconferences” that seem to be taking off in the high-tech sector. As I understand it, these events are characterized by the absence of an agenda — no preprogrammed breakouts or keynotes, and no topics set in stone. Instead, attendees design their own topics and session agendas on site. Is it possible to successfully adapt this format to a nontechnical industry (namely specialty retail, like ours)? What do I need to know and do to pull one of these things off?
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Five Essential Ingredients
In the 23 years since I, along with 85 other brave souls, originated the “open-space” concept (the foundation of today’s “unconferences”) at the Third Annual International Symposium on Organization Transformation in Monterey, CA, more than 100,000 iterations of open space have taken place for purposes as diverse as designing products, pursuing peace in the Middle East, and planning corporate strategy. Participants have come from Fortune 500s, third-world villages, religious communities, governmental agencies, and whole towns. They have been rich, poor, educated and not, politicians, corporate bigwigs, and ordinary citizens. And in each case that I know of, open space appeared to do the job.
Open space is appropriate in any situation — retail included — where the following five preconditions are present:
1. A real problem needs to be solved.
2. The problem to be resolved involves high levels of complexity.
3. There are high levels of diversity among the people needed to solve the problem at hand.
4. High levels of conflict (potential or actual) are present.
5. There is an urgent need for resolution.
Even if these preconditions are all present for your retail franchisees, you may encounter some resistance. Every client I have worked with to develop an open-space event always says the same thing: “Harrison, this is a wonderful idea, but it will never work with this group.” So how do you sell open space to your stakeholders and attendees? The answer is that I never try. Remember that in most cases people don’t care about the process, they care about results. And the results you can promise them using open space are these: Every single issue that anyone in attendance cares about will be discussed. There will be a written record of what was discussed. And, if time allows, issues will be prioritized and an action plan to address them will be created.
To achieve those results, one of the best things you can do is to focus the event with a theme that resonates with attendees and that deals with the future of the business. The theme should be characterized by all of the five necessary preconditions for open space. The goal is to open up the space enough so that everyone has an opportunity to think creatively about the important issues, while making the theme specific enough so that it allows people to get some real, meaningful work done.
Finally, before you commit to the idea, read up on open space and learn as much as you can about it. Two very good resources are my own Web site, www.openspaceworld.com, and the Open Space Institute’s Web site (www.openspaceworld.org). In addition to an abundance of free resources, the latter offers a listserv through which you can connect with more than 500 people around the world who are putting the open space concept to work.
 Harrison Owen,
consultant and author of
“Open Space Technology:
A User’s Guide”
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It’s all in the Planning
We’re located in the heart of Silicon Valley, where unconferences take place all the time. To our knowledge, however, there had never been an unconference for our primary customer base: product managers who serve as consultants to engineers and businesspeople. So we decided to launch one. We invited 2,000 customers and friends to our first-ever unconference, called P-Camp. It was a huge success. Here’s what we learned:
 Send your franchisees an outline of how the format works in advance of the event. That way, they will understand that they are the conference, and they’ll be ready to participate, suggest talks, create panel discussions, and bring along their ideas, concerns, and issues to discuss. In your invitation, also stress that members of the group have to be willing to lead.
Make sure you will have enough attendees to create diversity and keep things interesting. Devise a solid invitation and recruiting strategy, and be sure to send plenty of e-mail reminders to registered attendees. Hand pick a few key customers or prospects whom you know have attended an unconference before and can get the ball rolling.
Book a good physical space with lots of separate rooms or areas for breakout discussions, and a big wall to paper over for do-it-yourself scheduling.
To be successful, you have to stand back and let things happen, which can be scary. I cheated a bit in this regard. To draw a crowd, I scheduled a few well-known speakers to address the audience prior to kicking off the unconference portion of the event. I also managed the topics a little bit by selecting a few discussion areas that I felt sure would generate some good conversation. It didn’t hurt, but I found that preprogramming topics wasn’t really necessary. In fact, I found that half of the topics attendees brought to the table were things I knew nothing about or hadn’t even remotely anticipated.
You can worry that your event will bomb, the topics won’t be interesting, or the speakers won’t be any good. But keep in mind that the same problems can crop up at any conference. The great thing about open space, however, is that attendees vote with their feet. For some talks, no one showed up. But we had seven simultaneous tracks going on and, thanks to the format, our attendees were able to make their own astute voting decisions on the fly. The spirit of the community made the whole event a success.
 Rich Mironov,
CMO, Enthiosys Inc.,
Mountain View, CA
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strike the right balance
It is absolutely possible to adapt the open-space method for conferences in any industry. The format works universally. Just this spring, for example, I facilitated nine unconferences, including two for nontechnical groups. Based on that experience, I have four key tips that will help you put open space to work.
1. Blend open and planned space. At the unconferences I design and facilitate, most of the time is spent in open space, but not all of it. It may be that opening with a keynote or presentation about emerging industry trends would be a good thing. This format of one-to-many broadcast, however, should never take up more than one-fifth of the total daytime hours of the event.
2. Schedule wisely. If you decide to create a hybrid event consisting of some open-space time and some preprogrammed sessions, schedule the open-space sessions following the pre-programmed ones. Why? Open space is just that: very free and open. It is a creative and alive experience where all participants can schedule a breakout session and address topics that are most important to them. Once you have generated that kind of energy in a group, asking everyone to sit still and watch a panel presentation or listen to a single speaker just doesn’t work.
3. Go all in. For open space to work, you must trust the process. So if you are going to use open space for part of your event, then go all out — even if for just an afternoon. The whole concept fails if you try to parallelize preprogrammed sessions alongside open space.
4. Trust the experts. Taking a leap into this form of event planning can be nerve-wracking, but trust your planner or facilitator. Trying to overly control the process to make it safe for your audience will kill the energy.
 Kaliya Hamlin,
independent designer and
facilitator of unconferences
for professional communities
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