Wave Rider: Leadership for High Performance in a Self-Organizing World

What began forty years ago as a journey of exploration into the interplay between chaos, order, and the creative process culminates in this capstone work of Harrison Owen’s pioneering career. From the creator of Open Space Technology (OST), Wave Rider shows how to apply the fundamental principles of OST to the day-to-day management and leadership of organizations. Owen lays out eight concrete steps for aligning ourselves with the driving power behind OST’s immense success: the primal force of self-organization. We can’t control it, but we can work with it—we can ride the wave.

Harrison Owen is president of H. H. Owen and Company. His aca- demic background and training centered on the nature and function of myth, ritual, and culture. In the mid-1960s, he left academe to work with a variety of organizations, including small West African villages, urban community organizations (both in the United States and in Africa), the Peace Corps, regional medical programs, the U.S. National Institutes of Health, and the U. S. Veterans Administration. Along the way, he discovered that his study of myth, ritual, and culture had direct application to these social systems. In 1977, he created H. H. Owen and Company in order to explore the culture of organizations in transfor- mation as a theorist and practicing consultant. Harrison convened the First International Symposium on Organization Transformation and is the originator of Open Space Technology. He is the author of Open Space Technology: The Users Guide; Spirit: Transformation and Development in Organiza- tion; Leadership Is; Riding the Tiger; The Millennium Organization; Tales from Open Space; and Expanding Our Now: The Story of Open Space Technology.