Open Space to prepare for FedEx-Day… a report

This is what happened at a workshop at our annual company event…

Around 80 people from technology from Berlin, London, Amsterdam, Stockholm and Poland arrived in a creatively prepared location at a hotel in Potsdam. On a big wall an Open Space Market was built by sticky tape and paper cards. People sat around an imaginary stage (drawn again by sticky tape) on chairs or directly on the floor. After our CTO Daniel and special guest Mike from UK motivated the crowds for the coming FedEx-Day, a line of people with creative ideas formed around the stage. Those guys promoted their ideas each in a 30 seconds lightning pitch and sticked it to the Open Space Market on the wall. Then people distributed themselves all over the place with flipcharts to sketch out their ideas and to discuss them with interested followers. You could hear a buzzing all over the place and feel the creative energy all around. From time to time you could hear the sound of a Vuvuzela, signaling the people that the next round of idea sharing started. At the end again some of the guys reported and marketed their ideas. Even by trend more shy people felt encouraged to jump on the stage, grab the mike and promote their ideas. All in all the Open Space session was commented on “the most energetic, creative, useful business session ever”. As memory around 40 flipchart papers full of creative ideas remain and the hunger to implement those ideas on FedEx-Day!

Conclusion: Open Space is a very interactive, scalable, easy to prepare and over all a fun format. It can be used perfectly to prepare ideas for FedEx-Days, Hackathons etc.

Thanks to Robin Eggenkamp for the great photo of the 3 Scrum Masters!