Learn to Facilitate Open Space Technology and Transform Your Organization Through Powerful Meeting Facilitation
Learn the proven methodology that turns ordinary meetings into catalysts for organizational transformation, innovation, and sustainable change.
Join leaders, consultants, and facilitators from around the world who have learned this transformative approach.
The Hidden Cost of Ineffective Meetings
Every day, organizations lose thousands of dollars and countless opportunities because their meetings fail to harness the collective wisdom of their people.
- Wasted Human Potential: Traditional meetings suppress the knowledge, creativity, and passion that already exists within your organization, leaving solutions undiscovered and innovation stifled.
- Complex Challenges Remain Unsolved: When facing complexity, diversity of perspectives, and urgent decisions, conventional meeting formats fail to provide the collaborative breakthrough you need.
- Lack of Genuine Engagement: People leave meetings feeling unheard, uninspired, and disconnected from the outcomes, leading to poor implementation and organizational stagnation.
- Transformation Initiatives Fall Short: Without the right methodology to engage everyone’s leadership capacity, organizational transformation efforts fail to achieve lasting culture change and sustainable results.
The cost of continuing with ineffective meetings isn’t just time and money—it’s the unrealized potential of your entire organization.
Open Space Technology Unlocks Collective Wisdom
Open Space Technology (OST) is a proven participatory meeting facilitation methodology that creates optimal conditions for innovation, collaboration, and breakthrough solutions by unleashing the collective intelligence within your organization.
Tap Into Stakeholder Wisdom
OST recognizes that the information, knowledge, and wisdom needed to solve your challenges exists within your people – employees and external stakeholders alike. Learn how to create the space for this wisdom to emerge and be applied.
Handle Complexity with Confidence
Ideal for real issues of concern, bringing together diverse stakeholders, understanding how to best navigate complex situations, harnessing passionate energy, and urgent decision timelines.
Scale from 7 to 1000 Participants
Whether you’re working with a small team or a large conference, from half a day to multi-day meetings, OST provides a scalable framework that maintains effectiveness regardless of group size and meeting length.
Create Lasting Transformation
OST is valuable method for achieving organizational transformation. When meetings are regularly facilitated using OST, they support the transformation of the organization to the best version of itself, supporting the long term organizational health and balance that is needed to sustain peak performance.
Your Complete Learning Journey
This comprehensive module takes you from introduction through expertise, with each phase building upon the previous to ensure deep understanding and prepare you for practical application.
1. Discernment: Building Your Foundation
Establish your baseline knowledge and develop working definitions of key concepts including meetings, conferences, leadership, vision, community, management, relationships, wholeness and organizational transformation. Explore the context and origins of OST within organizational development and large-scale meeting methodologies.
- Complete a baseline measurement tool to assess your current OST knowledge
- Define core concepts critical to OST success
- Study real OST stories and case examples
- Understand OST within the broader context of organizational transformation
2. Readiness: Setting Up for Success Before You Begin
Learn to ensure sufficient readiness for a successful OST meeting, including readiness of formal leaders, sponsors, participants, and yourself. Develop clarity on what OST is and what it is not. You will learn to
- Develop processes for ensuring readiness for meaningful contribution and participation from all stakeholders
- Understand your role as facilitator throughout the process – in preparation, during the OST meeting, and in the follow-up
- Distinguish OST from other meeting formats and when it is the best facilitation method to use
- Reflect about how you show up – and want to show up – as a facilitator, understanding what is needed to show up as your best self
3. Engagement: Attraction through Understanding
Develop your own understanding of OST – not just a surface level definition, but a deeper understanding of the important elements to pay attention to every time you facilitate a meeting. Explore how the power of the invitation and theme engage people in their participation and affect meeting outcomes.
- Craft invitations that attract the right people with the right level of commitment.
- Develop OST meeting themes that attract and engage
- Understand the relationship between invitation and engagement
- Strengthen your understanding of OST as a whole – including an exploration of its form and essence
4. Construction: Designing Your First OST
Integrate all previous learning to construct your first OST meeting design – for a meeting, for a conference, and for use as a catalyst for transformation of the culture of an organization. Develop expertise from the perspective of an organizational development consultant specializing in meeting facilitation – a valuable perspective whether you are a consultant, facilitator, or leader working with OST.
- Design a complete OST meeting plan, turning theoretical learning into practical application
- Understand how OST can be scaled for meetings as short as a half-day to as long as a week, with groups of 7-1000 people, depending on the intended business outcomes
- Develop awareness of how OST can be used intentionally as an organizational transformation catalyst
- Build reusable templates and processes that you can use starting immediately after the workshop ends
5. Implementation: From Planning to Practice
Receive feedback and mentoring on your plans while fine-tuning them for real-world application. Share learning with other participants and enhance understanding through practical imagination exercises.
- Get feedback from both mentors and other participants on your OST design – learning more both from your own design and reflecting on what others have created
- Participate in peer learning and share meeting designs with others to take away a series of meeting designs to help get you started as an OST facilitator
- Practice implementation through guided scenarios
- Build confidence through mentored preparation
6. Monitoring & Adjustment: Supporting Long-Term Success
Learn to monitor your progress, referring to your baseline measures to understand how far your learning has come. Develop awareness of your work as a facilitator and how you can adjust it over time for continual improvement. Access ongoing mentoring circles for long-term monitoring and adjustment of your work as a OST facilitator.
- Learn to work with a simple tool for tracking your learning progress, continually pointing towards the next steps in strengthening your work with OST
- Develop adjustment strategies for improving results over time
- Join ongoing mentoring circles to reflect on your experiences, and the experiences of other participants, to deepen your understanding of OST
- Build a sustainable practice of continuous learning and improvement
Supporting Learning in Teams and Groups
At Dalar, we are big believers in whole teams and groups learning together. To support group learning, we are pleased to offer the following team discounts:
- 20% off for 3-5 participants
- 40% off for 6-10
- groups of 11+ please contact us for pricing or in-house training opportunities
Project, intact, cross-functional, and leadership teams, small organizations, boards, and volunteer groups are some examples of the kinds of groups eligible for these discounts. Contact Rachel Bolton for registration details.
This offer is applicable to Early Bird and Regular Rates of registration. It cannot be combined with any other discounts available (i.e Genuine Contact Organization member discounts).
Part of the Genuine Contact Way
This module offers a complete set of skills and knowledge that creates value on its own. It’s also part of the Genuine Contact Way – a modular approach designed with intention. You can engage with specific modules to meet particular goals in your work and life. When you’re ready to expand your learning, comprehensive Learning Paths are available, including Simplifying Leadership, Participatory Methods that Get Results, Designing Thriving Organizations, Aligning with Your Genuine Self, and Train the Trainer.
A Global Network of Authorized Trainers
Birgitt Williams and Rachel Bolton are authorized Genuine Contact Trainers. They are part of a global network of professional trainers and facilitators who teach the 19 learning modules included in the Genuine Contact Way of Working – including this one. You’ll find a complete listing of upcoming workshop dates – online and in-person and offered in several languages to suit your learning preferences in the International Genuine Contact Organization’s upcoming events calendar.
