Keywords

In a Word To enlist commitment, organizations depend on a clear and powerful image of the future. Future Search conferencing has emerged as a system-wide strategic planning tool enabling diverse and potentially conflicting groups to find common ground for constructive action.

On Politics by Other Means

Nine times out of ten, large-scale gatherings for exchange of ideas in (darkened) assembly rooms only dispense information; powerful individual or collective learning experiences rarely take place there. Why should this be the case if the raison d’être of a conference is to generate and share knowledge that impacts behavior and links to results? One explanation is that organizers do not shine a light on the conditions for learning outcomes.Footnote 1 Another is that learning may not, from the outset, be the real intent: indeed, paraphrasing Carl von Clausewitz, it often seems conferencing is the continuation of politics by other means. And so, when the agenda is—unequivocally—to learn, the mode of operation is increasingly participant-driven meetings such as unconferences; Future Search conferencing bodes well too.

Back to the Future

By the street of by-and-by, one arrives at the house of never.

—Miguel de Cervantes

Futures studies —aka futurology—is a transdisciplinary field of social inquiry for systemic study of medium- to long-term futures.Footnote 2 With foresight, futurists aim to discover or invent, propose, examine, and evaluate probable, possible, preferable, and prospective futures.Footnote 3 Specifically, since the future depends on what one does today, futurists argue with good sense that exploring alternative futures can help people make out and create their preferred future. “In the fields of observation chance favors only the prepared mind,” Louis Pasteur remarked. It stands to reason too that, where the stakes are communal, they might want to apply common sense for organizational change as a group.

The Flux Capacitator

Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.

—Søren Kierkegaard

Strategic planning is customarily the prerogative of a few—much as chefs de cuisine, senior staff task sous-chefs, chefs de parties, cuisiniers, commis, appentices, plongeurs, marmitons, and other members of the kitchen brigade with activities, inputs, and outputs. Would they understand that strategic planning is not haute cuisine: in that field, not many can ever describe—even less understand, enter into, and actively support—what they have summarily been told to lend force to. “You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you can’t fool all the people all the time,” Abraham Lincoln is thought to have said: what with the time-honored predilection for top–down strategic planning, people by now know beyond doubt when they are merely asked to lend legitimacy to someone else’s vision.

To change an organization, the more people you can involve, and the faster you can help them understand how the system works and how to take responsibility for making it work better, the faster will be the change. It doesn’t happen through isolated pilots projects.

—Marvin Weisbord

Quite the opposite, Future Search conferencing is a democratic approach to real time, large group change planning from a systems perspective.Footnote 4 It was developed by Weisbord (1992) and Sandra Janoff in the late 1980s to help organizations (and communities) create shared visions of the future in complex situations, including those characterized by ambiguity and conflict , and plot organizational directions linked to results.Footnote 5 The process is anchored by three principles informed by behavioral science:

  • Represent the system in one room.

  • Explore the whole in context before seeking to act on its parts, focusing on common ground and desired futures and considering problems as information.

  • Self-manage work and take responsibility for action.

In its most recurrent format, Future Search conferencing is a structured, 3-day event involving up to 64 participantsFootnote 6 from the same organization. It requires a minimum lead time of 2 months, during which a steering committee of mixed stakeholders selects the Future Search topic, makes necessary preparations, and briefs participants in advance—participants must know what to expect. It benefits from having a facilitatorFootnote 7 and cofacilitor/logistics manager. Last but not least, a working group must be set up before the conference to turn its outputs into a report and communicate that quickly.

We already have the statistics for the future: the growth percentages of pollution, overpopulation, desertification. The future is already in place.

—Günter Grass

Not a loose brainstorming exercise, Future Search conferencing is a carefully designed methodology linking inputs, activities, and outputs to result in a vision built on (i) appreciation of an organization’s history; (ii) acknowledgment of present-day strengths and weaknesses; and (iii) considered opinion about major opportunities in the future. Toward these, in four or five sessions each lasting half a day, participants keep to the following in small groups or plenary sessions:

You don’t need to predict the future. Just choose a future—a good future, a useful future—and make the kind of prediction that will alter human emotions and reactions in such a way that the future you predicted will be brought about. Better to make a good future than predict a bad one.

—Isaac Asimov

  • Focus on the Past: Highlights and Milestones In the first half-day, preferably after a warm up allowing participants to converse with one another, the Future Search gets underway with a look at the past. The eight groups contribute historical information and compose timelines of key events in the world, their personal lives, and the history of the Future Search topic. The groups tell stories about each timeline and what implications the stories have for the work they have come to do. No items are too silly or too small and no one dominates: forbearance on the beliefs and positions of others deepens comprehension and acceptance. This process creates a shared, global context for the Future Search.

  • Focus on the Present: External Trends Later, the entire assembly draws a mind map and ranking of ongoing trends affecting the system the participants operate or exist in and identifies which are most important in relation to the topic. This process clarifies what is impacting the organization.

  • Focus on the Present: Responses to Trends In the morning of the second day, the groups describe what they are doing about the key trends identified and explain what they plan to do in the future. This process helps assess current actions.

  • Focus on the Present: Owning Actions Later, the groups report on what they are proud of and sorry about in the way they are dealing with the Future Search topic. This process surfaces strengths and weaknesses in the organization and affords psychological safety for admission of errors.

  • Focus on the Future: Ideal Scenarios In the afternoon of the second day, the groups project themselves into the future and describe their preferred visionFootnote 8 of the future as though it had already come about. This process generates a clear and powerful image of a healthy organization—and its values —through which the participants would like to advance their joint purpose, to be made real over a 5–20-year horizon.Footnote 9

Nothing is more terrible than activity without insight.

—Thomas Carlyle

  • Discover Common Ground Later, the groups post themes they believe hold common—but not necessarily easy—ground for all participants. Disagreements are acknowledged without further discussion. This process enables participants to locate springboards for action, having elucidated what assumptions—e.g., the nature of society, the means of social change, and the attributes and roles of knowledge —underpin each.

  • Confirm Common Ground In the morning of the third day, the entire assembly dialogues to agree on common ground. This process helps participants conceptualize new behaviors for cooperative ventures.

  • Action Planning In the afternoon of the third day, champions throughout the organization sign up to implement action plans. Of course, authority, resources, and arrangements for action are confirmed by reality checks.Footnote 10 Participants walk out of the assembly room committed and ready to accomplish the envisioned future based on a more cogent framework that connects values and actions in new relationships and real time. This process formulates mutually supportive, practicable sets of rapid undertakings for individuals, groups , and the organization they are members of, close follow-up on which will determine whether change has occurred.

    figure b

    Fig. Typical future search agenda. Source Author

To Infinity and Beyond

It is always wise to look ahead, but difficult to look further than you can see.

—Winston Churchill

Summoning up what we are prone to forget, the very existence of organizations and communities intuits they already have the resources they need to achieve their purpose. What they may be short of is access to key others and enough time—away from distractions—to discover or invent what else they are capable and willing to realize in multiparty cooperation. Future Search conferencing is predicated on meeting 10 conditions for successful, fast change: (i) senior management adopts a new model of leadership, (ii) the need for change is self-determined and the change process is self-managed, (iii) the change model is based on trust and cooperation, (iv) there is broad stakeholder involvement, (v) awareness of circumstances is comprehensive, (vi) the focus is on seeing and realizing future possibilities, (vii) the entire organization is involved in shaping the vision, (viii) systems thinking is employed, (ix) change is guided by and emerges from strategic conversations, and (x) planning and implementation are simultaneous.

In today’s ever-more-interdependent yet polarized societies, building shared understanding of and achieving multiparty action on complex issues are certainly not straightforward. But it is harder to achieve it using conventional, problem-centered interventions. Future search conferencing can catalyze the transition from bureaucratic to learning organizations. It is a human process that takes decisive steps toward informed, democratic (meaning, noncoercive), and reflective enterprise. Even if not many evaluations of Future Search conferences are at hand,Footnote 11 its growing popularity gives an idea about what is possible when the right people are in the room, take time to grasp the whole system , and become able to act in creative and innovative ways. What is more, people tend to commit to plans they—not higher-ups—develop.