The search conference method for effective strategic planning: Its purpose and design and a condensed history of its development...

Purpose and design - The search conference is designed to identify within turbulent and uncertain environments a desired direction or end for the organization (specific endpoints are not achievable in uncertain environments because of the continuous shifts within it) and increase the effectiveness of strategic planning and its implementation by giving the people those actually affected by change more control over long term purposes and directions:

• In a search conference participants are searching for the most adaptive relationship between themselves and their environment.
• The process helps organizations to break through limiting assumptions and creates an environment which supports innovative learning.
• In the environment created during the search:
  • - People can accurately discern (from what had seemed a chaotic field of variables and factors) the possibilitiesor desirable trends and the limitations or constraints in their environment...
  • - Consider their shared history...
  • - And then develop plans and strategies which take advantage of the desirable trends and get around or ameliorate limiting factors and trends (strategies which may transform apparent limitations into advantages are also made more apparent during a search conference).

History

• 1960 - Fred Emery and Eric Trist created the first participative strategic planning method and field tested it in 1960 with the Bristol Siddeley Aircraft Engine Company in Great Britain. They called the method and process searching, or the search conference.
• 1965 - Emery and Trist publish a ground breaking causal texture article in Human Relations. Their message: The environment is an entity which changes its nature over time. A change in the environment effects the systems within it in ways different from that of the previous environment:
  • Bureaucratic organizations were introduced to produce a competitive advantage in a stable competitive environment whose reign is ending. These bureaucratic structures were
  • successful and viable for a time, however they did not meet peoples critical requirements for work. The result was that people felt alienated and unsatisfied at work. We are in a turbulent and uncertain environment where the bureaucratic, hierarchical structures and principles are more and more out of place and dysfunctional.
  • In an uncertain environment you need flexible, adaptive behavior and the capacity for the continuous redesign of work and adjustment to strategic plans.
• 1970s - Fred and Merrelyn Emery elaborated upon open systems theory to strengthen the method. During this period more than 300 search conferences were held in Australia. It was during this intense research and application period that the method was further developed with its strong theoretical base. Evolution of the method continues today through the interplay between theoretical understanding and application.
• 1980s - During the early 80s the search was brought to Canada, and in 1982, the Emerys brought it to the US.
• 1993 - Fred and Merrelyn Emery began sharing their approach with practitioners at a series of seminars and conducted a search on the future of participative democracy in US, Canadian and Mexican workplaces.