The first unconference I helped with almost died before lunch. Not because the method failed, but because the organizing team kept doing conference things to it. That event taught me more about Open Space than any successful one since. The failure modes are remarkably consistent across organizations. Here are the eight that show up again and again, and how to avoid them.
1. Over-structuring the agenda
The instinct is powerful: participants will want a schedule, so let’s pre-fill some slots. The moment you do, you have a bad conference with extra steps. Open Space works because the agenda is built by the people in the room, on the morning, in response to what actually concerns them that day. A “half-created” agenda guarantees that the pre-filled slots draw attendance away from what would have emerged naturally.
Fix: empty schedule wall, period. If leadership demands “some confirmed content,” run two anchor talks and keep the rest open.
2. A theme that is really a topic
“Agile transformation” is a topic. “What should our product org look like in three years?” is a topic too. Neither will carry an unconference. A workable theme is open enough that forty different people can find their own question inside it, and concrete enough that sessions feel related to each other. Compare: “The Future of How We Work Together” — someone will propose a session on meeting culture, someone else on tools, a third on office layout. All of them fit. All of them matter to somebody.
Fix: write the theme as a question the organization genuinely has not answered yet.
3. Not explaining the Law of Two Feet
The Law of Two Feet — if you are neither learning nor contributing, move somewhere else — is the engine of the whole format. When the facilitator mumbles through it, participants treat sessions as lectures they must sit out politely. Rooms stop moving, energy pools in the wrong places, and by the afternoon the event feels heavy.
Fix: the facilitator states the law in the opening circle, loudly, and names it as permission, not obligation. It also needs repeating: once mid-morning, once after lunch.
4. No one facilitates the opening
Open Space is not self-starting. The opening circle — where the theme is framed, the method explained, and people invited to write session proposals — needs a competent facilitator with a microphone and everyone’s attention. Teams that skip this (“people will figure it out”) get thirty confused people milling around a schedule wall, and the first sessions start twenty minutes late.
Fix: budget real time for the opening (45–60 minutes for a first-time group), and put your most experienced facilitator on it, not your most enthusiastic volunteer.
5. Blogging it instead of documenting it
At day’s end, Open Space produces a wall full of session notes. The traditional move is to write a summary email nobody reads. The better move: photograph every session sheet, drop them into a shared space organized by session title, and let teams pick up the threads. Sessions that generated real energy usually keep generating it — but only if the material is findable on Monday.
Fix: assign one person to documentation as their entire job for the day. Photographs of the newsprint sheets, one shared folder, circulated the same evening.
6. Ignoring the physical space
Open Space needs a large central room for the circle and 4-8 smaller spaces for sessions. When organizers book a venue with one big hall “and people can use the corners,” sessions compete with lunch traffic and each other. Noise bleeds. The format survives, but half the conversations happen in the hallway anyway — which is where they would have happened without the event.
Fix: a room for the opening and closing circles plus dedicated breakout spaces. A floor of an office building works. A rented café does not.
7. Inviting only the enthusiasts
An unconference of the already-convinced produces pleasant conversations and zero change. The people who need to be in the room are the skeptics, the quiet experts, and the people who own the budgets. Open Space is one of the few formats where a skeptic can’t hide at the back — and where their objection, voiced in a session, often becomes the most productive discussion of the day.
Fix: invite whole teams, including the people who will say “this is nonsense.” Especially those people.
8. Declaring victory at the closing circle
The closing circle is not the end of the event. It is the end of the beginning. Organizations that treat the unconference as a one-off feel great on Friday and change nothing by Monday. The sessions that surfaced real problems need owners, or the next unconference will re-litigate the same topics with a more cynical crowd.
Fix: in the closing circle, ask each session lead: does this need to continue? Anything that does gets a named owner and a follow-up date before people leave the room.
The pattern behind the eight
Notice what the failures have in common: every one of them is organizers adding conference behaviors to a format whose entire value is that it is not a conference. The method is older than the hype and sturdier than it looks. Trust the room, prepare the container, and stay out of the way.