People In Charge - Bob Rehm and Nancy Cebula

by

Robert Rehm, Nancy Cebula, Fran Ryan, and Martin Large

(New Society Publishers, 2002)

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Forward by Tom Devane

Introduction

Part One: All About Search Conferences

1. What Happens in a Search Conference?
2. Search Conference Design—The Open Systems Funnel
3. The Nebraska Mental Health Story
4. Principles at Work In Every Search Conference
5. Preparing for a Search Conference
6. After the Search: Co-creating the Desirable Future
7. Critical Mass in Nebraska

Part Two: Stories from Search Conferences

8. A Search Conference for Regional Planning: The Macatawa Story by Frank Heckman
9. Splitting System Principles at Microsoft by Kevin Purcell and Robert Rehm
10. Cooperative Water Planning: A Search for the Colorado Front Range by Robert Rehm
11. The Madison Benefits Group Story: The Search Conference Meets the Hoop and the Tree by Nancy Cebula and Evangeline Caridas
12. Creating Alignment in a Major Project: The Search Conference in Another Guise by Graham Benjamin
13. The Future of the YMCA in Palestine by Steve Hobbs

Epilogue: The Future of Search

INTRODUCTION

Imagine bringing a group of people together for a couple days to create the future of their community or organization. Along the way, they become a community of planners who dream large about their future and create a comprehensive plan of action to make their desired future come true. And picture people in this newly formed community carrying out their plan together.

That’s what a search conference can do for you. It gives you a plan for the future and a community of people ready to make it happen—a future that will work!

The people in a search conference could be citizens, community leaders, public officials, managers, activists, or workers in a manufacturing plant. The task they are working on could range from a strategic plan for a company to changes in social services in a city. It might be a merger, the creation of a new business, improved health care in a region, economic development for an urban area, a plan to improve productivity in a factory, or a plan to protect the environment.

Futures That Work is all about search conferences. It’s about what happens in a search conference and what results you can expect from doing one. In it, you will learn about the principles underlying a search conference and how these principles come to life before your eyes. You will get practical advice on how to plan a search conference and how to sustain the changes coming out of a search. And the book is loaded with examples of search conferences that made change happen in a variety of systems.

The search conference did not just pop up overnight; it’s not one of those management fads. Search conferencing has a long, rich history. The first search conference happened in 1960 in Great Britain when leaders of two aircraft engine manufacturers came together in the first search conference to merge their two companies into one. The inventors of the method and the leaders of that first search were social scientists Fred Emery and Eric Trist.

Since 1960, search conferences have occurred around the world on a range of topics and in a wide variety of forms. Eric Trist spread the word about search to many parts of the world, spawning a creative flow of designs and styles. Fred and Merrelyn Emery developed their own way of search conferencing in Australia, and planted the seed in North America and the rest of the globe. Other search conference variations have been developed around the world, as well.

Fred and Merrelyn Emery influenced us the most. We are grateful to them for teaching us their way of searching. The four of us have evolved our own variations on search conferencing over the years. This book is the product of our experience doing search conferences in different parts of the world with a wide variety of community and organizational systems. We hope that you will develop your own ways of searching just as we did.

We also appreciate the leaders, managers, and consultants whose stories enriched this book: Kader Asmal, Graham Benjamin, Catherine Bradshaw, Evangeline Caridas, Louisa Dossi, Aurilee Ferguson, Walt Grady, Paula Hartig, Frank Heckman, Sue Higgins, Steve Hobbs, Nancy Intermill, Dale Johnson, Beth Macy, Paul Mack, Beth Madison, Katheryn Martin, Dennis Mayhew, Mandla Mchunu, Terry Noseworthy, Pete Peschang, Kevin Purcell, Joan Roberts, Roy Romer, Dave Thomas, and Rich vander Broek.

We wrote the book for any community leader, activist, or citizen wanting to learn a creative and energizing way to plan for the future of their community on issues such as environment, health, social services, or education. The search conference is a community building approach that produces new relationships and real action. The book is also ideal for leaders of corporate or public sector organizations interested in producing strategic plans that will make their organizations or departments more effective and adaptive in our fast changing environment. And we think this book will give human resources professionals a useful tool for bringing people together to make effective, creative change happen for their organization and its people.

Search conferencing has gained broad acceptance over the decades. Now, we think, the time is right for searching to take off and become an even more widespread way of bringing about change in communities and workplaces. Fred Emery and Eric Trist, the creators of the search conference, coined the term “turbulent environment” to describe the way global change is accelerating these days. Our fast-changing environment has brought us many benefits—instant communications, medical breakthroughs, and a host of technological innovations. But there is also a troubling downside.

Change is happening so fast today that people in their institutions cannot keep up. Emery and Trist thought that unless people got a grip on their increasingly turbulent environment, they would experience their society as being more and more alienating. People would not experience one another as important to their own future. They would withdraw into their private worlds. People would try their best to cope with the uncertainty of the turbulent world by being indifferent to it or cynical toward their institutions such as government, big business, and the media. The big problems of our times would be over-simplified into black and white issues, right and wrong. And people would shrink from taking responsibility for solving problems in their communities and workplaces.

We think this is an accurate description of what is happening too often in today’s world—not always, not everywhere, but enough to cause concern. The antidote is active participation—people creating action-oriented communities based on shared ideals about the future of their system.

The search conference is a practical way to build communities of people who step up to the challenges of our turbulent times and take responsibility for making change happen in a purposeful way. As the world becomes more and more turbulent, the need is great for people to form communities to search for their desirable futures together. The search conference puts people in the driver’s seat of change, so they can steer together toward the future they want for their system, making adjustments as they go forward.

Part One of Futures That Work is all about the search conference. It features the principles, a step-by-step design, and examples needed to understand the power of the method, plus useful information on how to prepare and follow up a search conference.

Chapter 1 of this book, The Search Conference, takes you immediately inside the room where a search conference is underway and describes what is going on. Then, the chapter shifts to an array of real search conference stories, brief vignettes that showcase the variety of search conference applications from public to private sectors, from community to corporate settings.

In Chapter 2, Search Conference Design—The Open Systems Funnel, we walk you through, step-by-step, the basic search conference design to give you an accurate portrayal of what to expect when you do a conference. It includes the three search conference phases—learning about the environment, learning about the system, and action planning. Following the description of a typical search conference comes the story of the Nebraska Mental Health search conference, chapter 3. This compelling, system changing story brings to life each step of the search conference design, showing the power of the method for producing significant change right in the room.

Chapter 4 discusses the various principles and concepts underlying every search conference. Open systems theory shows how any system—whether community or corporation—can learn from and affect its external environment. Ecological learning guides the down to earth learning-by-doing way of searching. Using what we call the democratic design principle assures that search conference participants are in control of their own planning. Every search conference sets up conditions in which democratic dialogue can take place. Conflict management happens through the discovery of common ground agreement among participants. And group dynamics principles keep the group focused on its agreed upon task.

Preparation is the key for any search conference to be successful and produce lasting change. Most of the conditions for doing successful searches revolve around effective preparation. Chapter 5 goes into detail concerning every planning issue, including setting up a planning group for the search; identifying the conference task and purpose; and selecting participants. The chapter ends with a discussion of logistical concerns—where to have the conference, how much time the conference will take, how many people, and conference room arrangements.

Chapter 6 is about follow up after the search conference ends. The chapter tells how you can use a participative design workshop to organize implementation groups so that they are clear on their task and process. Chapter 7 describes critical mass theory and its application to search conferencing as a way of spreading and sustaining the innovations coming out of the search. We return to the Nebraska mental health story discussed earlier in the book, and spell out how the changes decided at that first conference spread through the state of Nebraska over the past several years.

Part Two of the book is a collection of search conference stories covering a wide variety of systems—corporate, community, and public sector. The storytellers are the people who were involved in the design and facilitation of the conference.

Frank Heckman, in Chapter 8, takes us inside the search conference that developed the Macatawa, Michigan regional plan and shows how citizens and leaders carried out important action plans together. Kevin Purcell and Robert Rehm tell the story in Chapter 9 of how a Microsoft products group used a search conference for product planning and how the constructive use of conflict led them to a creative solution nobody expected.

Chapter 10 is about how water engineers at the behest of the Governor of Colorado used a search conference to produce a regional water plan that would prevent the building of a dam. Nancy Cebula and Evangeline Caridas bring us the story in Chapter 11 of a small benefits company that did a search conference with all its employees to discover ways to manage rapid growth, and along the way found ways to integrate the achievement and relationship sides of their business. They called it the Hoop and the Tree.

Chapter 12 stretches the boundaries of search conferencing. In it Graham Benjamin shows how a big energy company applied search conference principles and concepts to create stakeholder alignment in a major building project. In Chapter 13 Steve Hobbs relates the amazing story of the YMCA in Palestine doing search conferences to discover their desirable future in an environment of political upheaval.

We start with a description of what happens in a search conference.