Expanding Our Now: The Story of Open Space Technology

Owen Harrison is no longer just the man who wrote the book on Open Space Technology — He’s now the man who wrote the books. Expanding Our Now is Harrison’s second crack at explaining the organizational theory he developed after watching a celebration in an African village. Basically the theory boils down to this: A group will organize itself to solve a specific problem if you sit everyone in a circle and get out of the way. The nuts-and-bolts of this process were described in Harrison’s earlier, Open Space Technology: A User’s Guide. This time around, the author gives us a bit more history and theory. Your reaction to this book will depend to a large extent on how ready you are to accept OST as a concept and how open to new management techniques you are in general. But even if you’re not in the market for newly minted organizational theories, we at getAbstract.com recommend that you read this book, if only to absorb some of its innovative suggestions about how to get the most out of that bane of corporate life — the meeting.