Search Conferences
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!
When you enter the room to begin a search conference, you join 20 to 40, or maybe
more, people who are there because they are an important part of their system. They
are managers and organization leaders, if the search conference task is to create
a new strategic plan for your organization. Or, if it is a community search conference,
participants are community leaders, public officials, and citizens with knowledge
and interest in the issue being searched, such as the community’s economic future
or improving social services. You and your fellow participants have been invited
to the search conference not to represent the interests of others not there, but
because you are important to the conference task and purpose.
As you look around at all the people in the room, consider the group to be a human
jigsaw puzzle. In the next couple of days, you will focus on putting the puzzle
pieces of strategy together that will produce your system’s most desirable future.
In the room, each person contributes knowledge about some piece of the overall puzzle.
The idea is to get the right people, such as you, in the room, those whose participation
is critical for doing the job of planning for the future.
A search conference is normally three days and preferably off-site. You and other
participants immerse yourselves in a “social island” setting in which you will form
new relationships and commitments. During the conference people work together as
a large conference community, with small groups for specific tasks.
We call it “searching” because the conference community searches through its external
environment and system, collecting, analyzing, and synthesizing data. The reason
for searching through your system’s turbulent environment is that for your system
to thrive in the world, it has to be adaptive in its environment. Your system has
to find ways to plan actively, so that your system is both responding to and changing
its environment as it goes. We call it “active adaptation.”
Adapting does not just mean getting faster or being more flexible. It means becoming
actively adaptive—developing your system’s capacity to continuously learn from and
change its environment. Your system can reduce turbulence by changing the conditions
that surround it and by influencing its future direction.
The search conference is designed to provide a learning environment in which participation
is equal and open, regardless of hierarchy or position. People’s words are recorded
on chart paper for all to see. There are no individual workbooks, as the emphasis
is on restoring oral culture, dialogue, and discussion.
You will notice that the search conference has no lectures, speeches, keynote addresses,
or training sessions. There is nothing to make it appear that people are in a training
workshop or traditional conference in which expertise resides in the presenters.
And there is no need for people to experience chaos in order for learning or change
to occur. You will experience nothing mysterious in a search conference—just people
doing real work on important tasks.
Professional facilitators lead the search conference. They have the training to
do the job and are experienced in conference design, leadership, and use of search
principles. You can expect these facilitators to be responsible for providing clear,
appropriate tasks for the group to do and they manage time for you in a way that
allows for deliberation and true dialogue to occur. What you will not see facilitators
do is to participate in the content of your discussions. That is your job, not theirs.
Towards the middle of the search conference, after you have discussed and analyzed
what’s been happening in your system and its environment, you work in small groups
to create your system’s most desirable future. You share your ideas for how to make
your system better than ever. And together as a conference community, you agree
on which future ideas to make happen.
You spend most of the third day of the search conference setting up plans of action
to bring your desirable future down to earth to make sure it really comes true.
As you leave the search conference, you know what you and the others are going to
do next—literally the next weeks and months to follow—to implement your plan. You
leave feeling satisfied with a sense of inner joy about what you have accomplished
together.