One production managers reaction to the Emery search conference and participative design Jim Heckel, production manager at Hewlett Packards Greeley, Colorado facility... "We used the search conference to develop a plan to build manufacturing flexibility by developing a workplace where employees are supported by management to act as if they are owners. We brought together all of management in manufacturing and a selected crosssection of employees (which would work as selfmanaging teams) to establish six Year 2,000 initiatives for employees acting as owners: Rethinking our compensation/recognition system... Centering on key core manufacturing competencies... Get closer to customer needs... Exploring information technologies for those which will... help make us more productive... Promoting awareness of diversity issues... Redesign and restructuring the workplace. Participative design, or turbocharged STS as I call it, was selected for redesigning and restructuring the workplace because it is faster and more participative - which leads to higher commitment and some, but much less, resistance than traditional design. It is also less consultant dependent and the boundary of analysis can be very small (a single team) or very large (whole division of plant) which gives us tremendous flexibility. The design component of participative design was new for us, but not its philosophy we were already a Theory Z organization. I believe participative design will help us operate smarter by giving our people the ability to control and coordinate their work from the perspective of being owners." A word of caution on seeing all search conferences as being alike... The search conference under discussion here is the one which Fred and Merrelyn Emery developed in Australia. It is not the future search conference associated with Marvin Weisbord. Weisbords approach is an elaboration of the Schindler-Rainman and Lippitt collaborative community design (dropping small group facilitators and the skill training component). It lacks many of the aspects of our model to arrive at implementable plans: Stakeholders from outside the system (as defined) are included in planning which conflicts with our understanding of open systems thinking and the principle that the group doing and implementing the planning is responsible for controlling and coordinating its own work. There is no process for integrating the work of groups or for making any conflict rational and understood. It is these two processes of integration and sorting out in a precise way what is agreed to and what is not which ensures that a community comes into existence. Without these processes people may either revert to dependent behavior or withdraw into apathy and low energy. The Emery search conference allots a third of its time to the systems leaders developing detailed comprehensive action plans. When a search includes stakeholders it can hamper or endanger the development of a fully implementable set of action plans.