Publications

I’ve been sharing all of my practice resources online since 1998. My working notes archived at MichaelHerman.com/WorkSpace. I’m the founder and steward of OpenSpaceWorld.org, the leading global portal for the practice of Open Space Technology, with materials in something like seventeen languages. See also my Resources LIbrary for specific practice tools and some collected materials I find most helpful.

Please contact me with any questions or comments about sharing these materials. Thank you!


Enterprise Scrum for Business Agility

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Open Space and Inviting Leadership

  • The Inviting Organization Emerges [html] (1998, updated 2016) – the centerpiece of the Inviting Organization collection I published in 1998, mapping the future evolution of organization beyond command and control, updated to include the Agile movement in software and beyond.
  • Open Space Technology: A User’s NON-Guide [pdf] – an OST sutra on the inner game of opening space, edited from two months of extraordinary conversation about the inner game of opening and holding space, with 37 active participants and hundreds of lurkers, on the OSLIST global practice community email list (2002). Michael Herman and Chris Corrigan (editors).
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  • Grandma’s Lullaby [pdf] – a short personal story with lessons for leadership and transformation, for facilitators, coaches and anyone dealing with Alzheimers (1998).

Connecting Agile, Open Space and Organization Design

Agile.FM
  • Inviting Agile Requirements – using Open Space with complex stakeholder groups to create better, faster, SMARTer working context for agile development teams. This presentation is my distillation of Sandra Walsh’s dissertation work, where I was credited as a contributor. Sandra’s work was specifically about technical requirements, but this approach works for any roadmapping situation.
  • What Can Agile Learn from Participative Design? – presentation for Agile user group introducing Emery and Trist’s pioneering work on forming self-managing teams, with roots in the Socio-Technical Systems movement after WWII. I used this approach to set-up self-managed teams in 1995, years before the Agile Manifesto made self-organization “a thing” in software.
  • OpenSpaceGoesMainstream – Daniel Mezick made early connections between Agile and Open Space, highlighting my work Inviting Organization work, though his chronology misses the earliest Open Space Agile events I facilitated in 2002 and 2008. I was one of Daniel’s first OS teachers. He was one of my first Agile teachers. A good trade!