It is now possible to create organizations in which individuals can fully utilize their mind, heart and spirit; where the values, expectations and highest ideals of individual members are embodied in the structure and mission of the organization.
Today, people are also able to transform their enterprises into ones that continually reinvent themselves and improve performance via a learning process that produces an ongoing and active adaptive relationship between itself and its ever changing uncertain environment. We can now transform maladapted bureaucratic, hierarchical, autocratic organizations into highly innovative, flexible and adaptive organizations because of two practical and field tested methods: participative design and the search conference.
Over the past forty years we have conducted both theory development and field research (begun by Fred Emery) which have now produced these two methods which create effective, flexible and adaptive organizations. These methods use outside consultants only to help your organization gain access to and reliance upon your own resources and capabilities.
In this article we share the field tested principles and theory which make the search conference, as we have developed it, a highly effective method to create strategic plans.
If you are tired of magical visions, losing market-share, plans that sit in file drawers, people working at cross purposes, treading water and going nowhere, then the search conference will bypass these problems. It is systemic, reliable, replicable and will produce plans that will work - plans that people will want to implement. The search conference will give you the capability to discern the meaningful variables (and relevant trends) and successfully adapt your enterprise to the turbulent and uncertain environment of today and the foreseeable future.
To assert that we have a method to help people deal with environmental uncertainty and turbulence is of little use unless we share a common understanding of this uncertainty. Therefore we will begin by sharing our understanding of uncertainty in the environment of business, government, society and communities.
The cassava are dying! A few years ago agricultural scientists were scurrying around quite troubled about a food crisis in Africa. The scientists were concerned because in a region larger than the United States the cassava crop (a staple food for the continent) had been devastated by an insect pest called the mealy bug.
The bug had seemingly come out of nowhere. It threatened starvation for millions of people if it could not be stopped. The countries in its path were poor and had little infrastructure, insecticides were therefore hard to use and had little effect on this resilient pest. Another group of scientists thought that since cassava were also grown in South America that perhaps they could locate a stable environment wherein the mealy bug was naturally controlled. Through a good deal of intense field research they found a few of the mealy bugs in Paraguay where it had caused so little trouble that it was not even a recognized species. They discovered there a small wasp which laid its eggs in the mealy bug for its larvae to use as food during maturation.
After they had raised hundreds of thousands of wasps and released them from airplanes across the continent, in an amazingly short time the wasps did their job and the cassava environment was once again stable. And so it would be expected to remain; at least until another discontinuity suddenly appeared to threaten food sources in an another unexpected way.
What we mean by environment - Fred Emery and Eric Trist said in a 1965 article in Human Relations that they worked out some important distinctions about systems and their environments:
When you think of a system it could be your family, your enterprise (or a sub component of it), your community or even your nation. The environment of the particular system you now have in mind has a myriad of people, variables, structures, rules, relationships, et cetera within it which change and shift over time.
This global environment of the enterprise is similar to the full context from which a quote is often extracted - accurately or inaccurately. Planning without having a good understanding of how your organizations global environment has changed or what new or previously undetected opportunities or threats are present is like depending on a quote out of context as a guide to decision making or action. Some systems may, in addition, have to examine their task environment. The task environment is a of the global environment. It may be an industry with its competitors, suppliers, customers, and may include the larger organization surrounding the unit doing the planning. It is, in turn, connected to the global environment in all its complexity.
The nature of the environment... In a 1965 article on causal texture, Fred Emery and Eric Trist first used the word turbulent to describe what was then a barely visible emerging environment - the one which we are all so familiar with and live and work in today. Uncertainty is the essential condition within a turbulent environment. Uncertainty is produced by a dynamic and changing environment, wherein there are frequent and dramatic shifts in social values that foster instability.
But only yesterday things were different... In an uncertain and turbulent environment discontinuities can seemingly come out of nowhere to throw everything into chaos for any particular system within that environment. Current stability is no guarantee that tomorrow or the next day will turn out as you expected. What we now understand is that systems and their environments co-evolve together. That means you can influence your environment by developing strategies which stabilize some of its parameters. The global environment is still uncertain but for you with your plan it becomes understood and much more manageable.
So how/why did things change? Prior to the full emergence of our current turbulent and uncertain environment much of the developed and less developed world had experienced a competitive environment and planned accordingly. In this competitive environment two or more systems of a similar type such as the old Big Three auto makers, the AP, UP and Reuters news services, or the old PanAm, American, United, Eastern fearsome flying foursome competed for the same finite resources and customers. This competitive environment, as Fred Emery noted in the 1977 book, Futures We Are In, and its social values were essentially stable, and industry structures only changed incrementally over time.
Strategic planning in a competitive environment... In a competitive environment it makes good sense to simply look at past performance of your enterprise and that of your current competitors to predict the future. In a competitive environment you could rely on problem solving and experts to define, in technical and financial terms, the steps which would take you to your next set of predetermined end points - that was also how you needed to learn in that environment. As such, it made good sense to concentrate power at the top with the CEO and perhaps a few trusted advisors functioning as the brain of the firm -nurtured by expert information supplied by specialists and consultants. With a predetermined destination you were only concerned with the means to arrive there.
Why are so many in trouble today?... Most enterprises are still trying to analyze their environment with tools and processes designed for understanding a competitive environment instead of todays uncertain and turbulent environment. This is about as effective as using a candle to find your way in the middle of a force ten gale.
Things fall apart... Up through the late 1960s and early 1970s it was workable to pretend organizations were closed systems. But we would all have to be ostriches with heads in the sand to not recognize that our organizations are dynamically interconnected with the environment. Consider this short list of changes intruding from the global environment and recall how they have impacted on your enterprise:
How shall we act? In today's uncertain environment it is important that people recognize that their enterprise must learn and plan as an open system to survive. This requires you to continuously scan the global environment, so when you do notice a mealy bug in or about to enter your cassava patch system, you will be able to adjust your plans accordingly. In an open system enterprise, every one of your enterprise's autonomous components should be able to function as a learning, planning community fully capable of adapting and fitting its new strategies to those of the larger system and the external environment.
The steady straight arrow of the past can't hit the target anymore... In a competitive environment, like Robin Hood, you could simply string an arrow, sight the target and let fire. In a turbulent, uncertain environment the target (consumer acceptance of products or services) is rarely stationary and in fact the target may change shape and location in relatively short periods of time.
Uncertainty and the interdependencies among and between systems created by it mean that a change in the nature of one system sets off changes in another which sets off another and on and on. Any new state of affairs must be jointly determined by your system in relationship to the larger environment whether you do so passively (your probable future) or actively (moving toward your desirable future) so that you have some influence in a co-evolutionary process.
Under these circumstances organizations must be able to travel along with the arrow and rapidly change course along the way as the target changes its shape and location. The subtle but important shift in attitude here is that your skills of dealing with uncertainty must be directed at achieving a successful endpoint with flexible adaptive behavior not in selecting a specific and unchanging endpoint.
Increased stability, yes but more uncertainty is to be expected... When you do strategic planning, using the search conference as Fred and Merrelyn Emery have developed it, you will be able to establish a greater degree of stability in your environment, but discontinuities will continue to surface. Many parameters will still change and/or disappear entirely. The breakup of the Soviet Union, destruction of the vinyl disk recording by the CD or the recasting of network television by the advent of CNN, cable networks and FOX Broadcasting are just three examples of rapid change in the global environment.
The key is being able to adjust and redefine the path to the target as you go... People are successful in this type of environment when they are all involved in implementing their plans and stay actively adaptive. A sketch map of the immediate terrain is often the best you can manage along the way. Those who pay close attention to the terrain rather than relying on the map of how they succeeded in the past are those most likely to succeed.
Its time for a wake up call! It's time to throw away our information junk food and stop relying solely on experts and set plans based on linear, mechanical views of the environment. Actions based upon such data will be born out of incomplete perceptions of the environment and will not only miss the mark, they will actually increase the uncertainty of your task environment.
Strategic planning, survival and ongoing success... Recall, if you will, that we said in the opening of this article that it is possible to work in organizations that continually reinvent themselves and improve performance via a continual learning process that produces an active adaptive relationship between itself and its changing uncertain environment. To produce a successful alignment of this important adaptive relationship each organization must ask itself:
Merrelyn and Fred have spent the last 25 years developing the search conference, making it more reliable and replicable and teaching it to others. It has been used throughout the world for participative strategic planning for a variety of levels of organization:
The search conference has also been used to resolve and plan the future for a variety of issues:
One of the most powerful applications of the search conference is that it can enable enterprises seeking to create partnership or alliances to discover areas of agreement/disagreement and to rationalize the areas of disagreements, thus making their relationship sustainable.
The search conference has been used to bring into being:
Where does its versatility come from? It comes from an understanding of systems in their environments and the laws which govern the nature of the system, the nature of the environment and their relationship (the laws governing an uncertain/turbulent versus a competitive environment are different).
Is the search best for large or small systems? The search conference may be used for nearly any size or type of system you may choose to focus upon:
The key, again, is aligning the adaptive relationship between the system you are focusing on and its environment. Through the search conference you are able to establish a system principle which will operate between a system and its environment. That principle looks like a set of purposes and may be translated into a mission statement (a mission statement, however, is an oversimplification of a required set of purposes or strategic goals).
Once you know that set of purposes your task becomes making action plans to set up an active adaptive relationship between that system and its environment; making it work and keeping it adaptive over time. And you can expect as discontinuities appear that a particular strategic goal may be added, changed or dropped to keep the adaptive relationship aligned.
Vital pre-steps to the search conference - Even before your enterprise is ready to begin the search conference there will be much preparation:
The choice of participants... The selection of participants is always critical but will vary depending on the type of search conference you are running. In an organization the people who attend the search conference are those who are paid to take responsibility for the overall direction of the entire organization. In other types of searches you need to use a process called a community reference system.
When those people are brought together in a search conference, they become equals, regardless of formal status differences. The participants are responsible for all content work and to make the plan happen. The participants are also responsible for controlling and coordinating their own work as a large self managing group after the planning process. This group will then have to involve other organizational members whose abilities can contribute to making that future a reality. And when the planning itself is temporarily finished these people will continue to scan the environment and adjust their plans accordingly.
Interaction between top management and the search conference managers... Creating an active adapting enterprise begins with top management, as they are responsible for the strategic direction of the enterprise. They know the puzzle which has to be solved and the people who carry the knowledge in their heads who can solve that puzzle. (This is not a puzzle in the sense of a board game where all the parameters can be known. It is a puzzle in the sense that you must get to know all the parameters so you can establish a desirable set of strategic goals.)
The tasks of top management and the conference manager... The task of top management is to bring together 20 to 40 of those people who carry the strategic knowledge of their organization. he conference managers task is to collaboratively design and manage the learning environment, the process and the structure of the puzzle solving process.
The search conference goals - Successful implementation of plans and a continuing adaptive capacity is the true test of this method. To get to that point, the search conference is structured to achieve one primary goal:
There are also two important process goals:
Sustaining a fully democratic dialogue requires trust... An absolutely essential part of the search concerns creating the conditions for trust between participants. This means that the planning environment must contain the following elements:
Out of the box thinking and who leads? The design of the search conference is significantly influenced by research done by Bion, (reported in his 1952 book, Group Dynamics) at the Tavistock Institute on what happens when groups come together to do creative work.
When groups come together for creative work, such as strategic planning, the usual tendency is that a leader has already been selected or the group elects a leader. Bureaucratic society (its institutions, schools, government, enterprises, large conference gatherings etc.) organizes its work by freezing people within one role - dependency (people are given a supervisor to whom they look for all the directions and solutions while they devalue their own and others abilities).
Another research finding of Bion's is that when a group elects a leader (or has one selected for it), it may then unconsciously perceive that person as dangerous to the groups existence and fight with or, more commonly, withdraw from them into apathy and low energy for the task at hand.
These tendencies can be avoided if you keep a group responsible for control and coordination of its own work. The trust necessary for a fresh reading of your organization and its global and task environments cannot be built and maintained if a parent/child or expert leader/unknowledgeable follower relationship dominates the search process. (Facilitators are expected by a group to occupy the role of supervisor and frequently produce the same dependency behavior).
This also sets the stage for a permanent dropping of these types of relationships throughout the organization if the search and strategic planning process is followed by a participative design process.
Stages of the search conference - The process consists of three basic stages:
Learning about the environment, your system and how to align the two... The search uses a very different form of learning than you find in conventional open-their-heads-and-pour- it-in education. The evidence is quite clear that organizations which rely solely on preprocessed information junk food (meaning that experts have analyzed it and served it up to you), with its inherent time delays and incomplete quantitative information, are in the long term less profitable. It is when we search through all the possibilities with a well chosen group of people that we arrive at implementable plans.
Our capacity for adaptation is a function of our perceptive ability. We have the inherent capacity to scan the system/environment relationship and we can redevelop our creative capacity to arrive at implementable plans and reawaken the learning abilities we all had as children. We can derive these directly from perception and ecological learning. That means that all reports, statistics and expert information relevant to your enterprise must be collected prior to the search conference. The search is a process for evaluating the importance and meaning of this material, as well as perceiving and making meaning of the natural and social environment.
Managing the search conference... It is easy for an inexperienced or unmentored search conference manager to slip into dependency creating behavior and prevent a group from thinking outside the box. The search conference requires able and skilled conference management. We have found it is best to have two conference managers given the complexity of the task. (Merrelyn Emery has developed a training program to teach this process.) Even after such a training program it is best to apprentice under the guidance of a skilled conference manager with a thorough understanding of theory and ample practical experience.
The success of this process depends on the practical experience and knowledge of the conference manager. It would be wise to check references with past clients when you consider this method, to make sure they had a satisfactory experience - particularly those who have had a year or so to implement their plans.
Sustaining momentum and fully implementing the strategic plan... After the search conference is concluded, the participants make their plan happen and do so in a democratic/participative/trust building manner:
The search conference is the most effective method we have encountered to restore an adaptive relationship between any organization and its environment. It offers leaders a reliable way of dealing with their uncertain environment.
You cannot continue to perceive planning as being in conflict with the content and processes of management, thus requiring expert planning staff or consultants to control the scanning process the critical knowledge to your enterprises success is not in their heads, its in yours. Experts can be helpful, but they belong in a supporting role.
Commitment is earned through participative planning, not analytical detachment. It is the joy people experience in the creative working mode, while engaged in self management, and the attachment of their deepest ideals into their plans which generates a sustainable energy to go forward.
It is foolish to continue dependence on the phantom of Taylorism and to rely upon the machine age nonsense that planning can be done by separating the enterprise into its parts and the detached rational integration of those parts into a comprehensive plan with one correct path to its accomplishment. Planning is a synthetic activity, of seeing wholes or gestalts, which the search conference was designed to accomplish.
Steven Cabana is the founder of Whole System Associates. The firms focus is designing processes that guide organizations to set a clear direction and reorganize themselves to get there. Cabana holds a MA from American University.
Merrelyn Emery has been involved in the development of the search conference and participative design methodology for over thirty years. Her most recent efforts have focused on the development and refinement of effective training programs for both methods. Her upcoming (co-authored) book Search Conferences in Action: Learning and Planning Our Way to Desirable Futures, will be published in the Spring of 1996 by Jossey - Bass.
Fred Emery, is a pioneer of self management, and democratization of workplace structures and processes. His work presently consists of mentoring participative design practitioners and working on a new book on systems thinking.
Coauthor Cabanas note: I would like to thank Rossana Alvarez (doctoral candidate at New Mexico State University) for reviewing several drafts of this article, Frank Heckman for his invaluable support, challenge and dialogue (based upon his deep experience with the search process) and Ron Purser and Charles Parry for their encouraging me to create the comparison between the stable and turbulent environments. I would also like to thank Fred and Merrelyn Emery for allowing me to facilitate the sharing of their years of field testing theory through practice with the readers of this publication.
Coauthors Fred and Merrelyn Emerys note: Fred and I want to thank Marvin Weisbord for his efforts to raise awareness of the Emery search methodology. We wrote this article to make a clear distinction between the direction Marvin took after studying the search methodology with us and the proven, practical path we have developed through iterative interaction between theory and practice and in collaboration with thousands of participants in search conferences over the past 30 years.
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This article was originally published in the Journal for Quality and Participation and is copywritten by the Association for Quality and Participation, 801-B W. 8th St., Suite 501, Cincinnati, Ohio 45203, Tel: 513-381-1959, Fax 513-381-0070: all rights reserved. You may download and print it for your own personal use. If you wish to share it with others by photocopying, e-mail or by placing it on another online service; reprint it in a newsletter, or reprint all or a portion of it in a book for resale, or in a packet included in a course for fee you should contact Ned Hamson, editor at the address or numbers above or at ParteoKid@aol.com for permission. This is the time, we are the people, lets work together Now! Return to PDA Hompage Return to IIRM Homepage Return to LACSA Homepage