Power to the people

I have a pen pal. Most of our communication is via email with the occasional phone conversation.

My pal Kenny is a busy senior executive who still finds time to talk to me even though he has never seen me and lives half a continent away. Pretty amazing, but then Kenny is rather special.

Kenny is the corporate ombudsman at KeySpan Corp., a Brooklyn, New York-based energy company. Before joining KeySpan he was a Roman Catholic monk.

You’d imagine that going from monk to manager would be quite enough stimulation for a single lifetime but Kenny keeps looking for ways to make corporate life better.

During our last conversation he shared with me his experiences with Open Space. Open Space Technology enables people to create inspired meetings and events. In Open Space meetings participants create and manage their own agenda of parallel working sessions around a central theme of strategic importance. In other words a group of anywhere between 20 and 200 people turn up at a session with no more than a theme - no agenda.

They spend the first part of the day setting up the agenda. People who are passionate about topics related to the central theme volunteer to run breakouts on that topic. Once everyone who wants to run a session has volunteered then they go to separate rooms and the remaining participants use their feet to take them to the subject that excites them.

Wow! Subversive. Talk about power to the people.

There are a whole bunch of things that excite me about Open Space but most of all I like that fact that it is so grounded in the positive. People are voluntarily seeking out what they are enthusiastic about.

Trouble with adopting something like Open Space is that managers have to have faith in their employees. They have to trust that employees really do have the best interests of the company at heart. And that, I believe, is the real challenge to the success of initiatives like Open Space.
I’d like to hear what you think.

Check out Kenny’s book The CEO and the Monk: One Company’s Journey to Profit and Purpose (John Wiley & Sons, 2004), written together with KeySpan CEO Robert Catell and writer Glenn Rifkin.