WHY FUTURE SEARCH?

How do you make your community, nonprofit, and business organisation more successful?  How do you solve BIG ISSUES that people care about and impact your performance and success? 


You can't do it alone.


People use Future Search for three main purposes: 


  • To create a shared vision and action plan for an organisation, network or community. 
  • To enable all stakeholders to act on common ground and take responsibility for their own plans. 
  • To help people implement an existing vision that they have not acted on together. 


Future Search is for Leaders who want higher commitment and better results in less time and at lower cost than with traditional strategic planning.


Future Search is a unique strategic planning method used world-wide by hundreds of communities and organizations.

WHAT IS FUTURE SEARCH?

Future Search is a strategic, principle-based PLANNING MEETING that helps people transform their capability for action very quickly. The meeting is task-focused. It brings together 60 to 100 people in one room or hundreds in parallel rooms.

Future Search brings people from all walks of life into the same conversation – those with authority, resources, expertise, information and need. They meet for 20 hours spread across three days. People tell stories about their past, present and desired future. Through dialogue they discover their common ground. Only then do they make concrete action plans.

The meeting design comes from theories and principles tested in many cultures for the past 50 years. It relies on mutual learning among stakeholders as a catalyst for voluntary action and follow-up. People devise new forms of cooperation that continue for months or years.

Future Searches have been run in every part of the world and in every sector of society.

The FUTURE SEARCH method is developed by Marv Weisbord and Sandra Janoff, the Founders of the FUTURE SEARCH NETWORK.


Text and Logo - used with permission from Sandra Janoff, PhD, Director, FUTURE SEARCH NETWORK

IS THERE A FUTURE SEARCH FOR YOU?

Hundreds of communities and organizations have achieved a shared vision and committed action from diverse stakeholders in a single FUTURE SEARCH.


Some of the ways FUTURE SEARCH has been used to help businesses:


  • Addressing a specific aspect of business performance
  • Integrating cultures following a merger of any size
  • Addressing quality, safety and productivity issues
  • Restructuring or redesigning a product line or the entire company
  • Revitalizing competitive potential
  • Enacting a vision for global customer service
  • Improving workplace learning and performance
  • Focusing together on a critical issue
  • Strengthening your business’s culture and values
  • Turning around performance and increasing productivity
  • Resolving Union/Management issues
  • Planning and managing organizational growth
  • Designing or implementing a new production line

Future Search Principles and Conditions for Success 

  • Get the “whole system” in the room. Invite a significant cross-section of all parties with a stake in the outcome.
  • Explore the “whole elephant” before seeking to fix any part. Get everyone talking about the same world. Think globally, act locally.
  • Put common ground and future focus front and center while treating problems and conflicts as information, not action items.
  • Encourage self-management and responsibility for action by participants before, during, and after the Future Search.
  • Urge full attendance – Keep part-time participants to a minimum.
  • Meet under healthy conditions – This means airy rooms with windows, healthy snacks and meals, adequate breaks.
  • Work across three days (sleep twice) – People need “soak time” to take in everything that happens.
  • Ask for voluntary public commitments to specific next steps before people leave.

DAY 1 Afternoon


Focus on the Past
People make time lines of key events in the world, their own lives, and in the history of the future search topic. Small groups tell stories about each time line and the implications of their stories for the work they have come to do.


Focus on Present, External Trends
The whole group makes a “mind map” of trends affecting them now and identifies those trends most important for their topic.

DAY 2 Morning


Focus on Present, External Trends
Stakeholder groups describe what they are doing now about key trends and what they want to do in the future.


Focus on Present
Stakeholder groups report what they are proud of and sorry about in the way they are dealing with the Future Search topic.


DAY 2 Afternoon


Ideal Future Scenarios
Diverse groups put themselves into the future and describe their preferred future as if it has already been accomplished.


Identify Common Ground
Diverse Groups post themes they believe are common ground for everyone.



DAY 3 Morning & Early Afternoon

Confirm Common Ground
Whole group dialogues to agree on common ground. Voluntary groups write Common Ground Statements that reflect the will of everyone present.


Action Planning
Volunteers sign up to implement action plans.