Future Search: Getting the Whole System in the Room for Vision, Commitment, and Action

Future Search is among the best-established and most effective methods for enabling people to make and implement ambitious plans. It has been used to redesign IKEA’s product pipeline in Sweden, develop an integrated economic development plan in Northern Ireland, and demobilize child soldiers in Southern Sudan. Written by the originators, this book is the most up-to-date account of this powerful change method.

This third edition is completely revised, reorganized, and updated with nine new chapters. It contains new cases and examples, advice on combining Future Search with other methods, and a summary of formal research studies. The chapters on facilitating diversity provide a theory, philosophy, and method for working with any task group.
Marvin Weisbord and Sandra Janoff offer specific guidance for Future Search sponsors, steering committees, participants, and facilitators and new ideas for sustaining action after the Future Search ends. They’ve added striking evidence of Future Search’s efficacy over time, examples of its economic benefits, guidelines for making Future Searches green, and much more. They include a wealth of resources—handouts, sample client workbooks, follow-up methods, and other practical tools.

If you want to do strategic planning, product innovation, quality improvement, organizational restructuring, mergers, or any other major change requiring stakeholder engagement, this book is your guide.

Marvin Weisbord, an international consultant for more than forty years, is the author of Organizational Diagnosis and Productive Workplaces Revisited and editor and coauthor of Discovering Common Ground.

Sandra Janoff, consultant and psychologist, works with Fortune 500 companies, small businesses, communities, and nonprofits on whole systems transformation.