Preparing a Search Conference

The Search Conference is a method, not a workshop. The two-and-a-half days in the room are the visible third of it; the preparation phase is what determines whether what happens in the room turns into anything afterwards. This guide walks through the eight elements that have to be in place before a Search Conference can responsibly run.

A Search Conference is the participative-planning method developed by Fred and Merrelyn Emery, in which the people who collectively are a community, organisation or sector read the conditions of the wider environment, agree the future they want, and decide what they will do about it. The workshop itself runs over two days and two nights. The preparation and the implementation are the rest of the method, and skipping either is the most common way the work quietly fails.

The eight elements below are drawn from Merrelyn Emery's Searching (1999), chapter 6, supplemented by the Aughton & Emery Sustainable Future Planning Handbook (2010) and the field practice that has crystallised around the method since.

1. Secure sanctioning

Especially for organisational Search Conferences, formal sanction from the sponsor and senior leadership is a precondition rather than a courtesy. The sponsor must agree, in advance, that the outputs of the event will be acted on — not reviewed, weighed against other processes, and watered down. Where there is a board, the board has to be involved; cases where boards have been excluded reliably produce strategic goals that come back vague and that the manager ends up having to rewrite. Sanctioning is also the moment at which the implementation structure (the two-stage model below) is named out loud so it is not a surprise after the event.

2. Define the system and its boundary

Most Searches that drift do so because the system was never properly defined. Take the time to settle what the system actually is, where its boundary sits, and — for organisational Searches — that what is usually described as a "network" is in fact an implicit system. The working distinction between the focal system, its task environment, and the wider extended social field has to be worked out before participant selection, because each implies a different set of people in the room. Rushing this step is one of the explicit "don'ts" in the canonical practice text.

3. Frame the purpose concretely

The purpose statement carries a heavy load: it tells the manager which scan to run, the participants what they are gathering for, and the sponsor what the deliverable will be. It has to be specific. A good test is that it names the system, the time horizon, and the kind of plan being produced. Aspirational mush — "explore the future", "build alignment" — produces aspirational mush in return. The work to land a concrete purpose is sometimes the longest part of the preparation, and it usually exposes whether the sponsor is actually committed to the method or is using it as cover.

4. Select participants via the Community Reference System

Participants are not representatives and they are not stakeholders. They attend as themselves, chosen because they each carry a piece of the jigsaw puzzle of the system in their heads. For community, industry or issue Searches the selection method is the Community Reference System — snowball nominations across a rough social map of the system, iterated until names start to recur. For organisational Searches the operational-responsibility population (senior management, union representatives) plus where helpful a modified reference system or sortition. Customers, suppliers and distributors are in the environment, not the system — they do not belong in the room. Optimal numbers are twenty to thirty-five; below fifteen the event takes on small-group dynamics and above forty it forces a Multisearch or a sacrifice somewhere else in the design.

5. Settle who manages it

The Search Conference manager is not a facilitator. The role is to run the process and stay strictly out of the content; the data, the desirable futures and the action plans must all be participant produced. A member of the organisation being Searched should not manage the event — the only safe exception is an internal change task force whose members have been demonstrably removed from their previous roles. Co-management is strongly preferred, with one manager active and the other listening for what Merrelyn Emery calls the "music" of the group; it reduces the risk of simultaneous-management failure and gives an apprenticeship path for the second manager. Managers without theoretical grounding and supervised practice should not be running Search Conferences at all — this is on the canonical "don't" list.

6. Plan timing, venue and materials

The hard rules: two days and two nights, no more, residential where at all possible, and never online. The late-afternoon start is intentional — it exploits the Zeigarnik effect so the first night's sleep does the work of consolidation before day two. The "social island" — a venue away from the day-to-day pull of work and family — is part of the method, not a perk. Materials are deliberately low-tech: butcher's paper, thick felt pens, masking tape. Whiteboards are explicitly out (anyone can wipe them, and people start asking for individual copies, which individualises what should be a collective product). Digital tools do worse for the same reason. Continuous tea and coffee, flexible meal buffers, no fixed seating.

7. Pair it with the right follow-on

Most Search Conferences fail at implementation, not at the workshop. Participants leave a DP2 event, walk straight back into a DP1 organisation, and the gains made over two days dissipate into committees and sub-committees that re-instantiate the structure the Search was meant to replace. The standard remedy is the two-stage model: pair the Search Conference with a modified Participative Design Workshop that designs the implementation structure on DP2 before participants leave. For community Searches the modified PDW is usually half a day, with the six-criteria analysis run against an analogous prior experience and the skills matrix built from the action plans rather than from an existing job structure. Either way, the follow-on is part of the preparation, not an afterthought — it shapes who needs to be in the room, what they need to be briefed on, and how the venue and schedule are set up.

8. Brief the sponsor and prepare the room

Before participants arrive, the sponsor and senior management need to be briefed concretely on what will happen, on what their role is, and on what they will and will not be able to do during the event. The sponsor opens the Search and then steps back; ambiguity about that role on day one is one of the more common ways the event gets derailed. The room is prepared with the eight phases of the workshop mapped out on the walls in advance — the visual scaffolding is part of how the community work assembles itself — and the manager and co-manager walk it together so the run-of-show is unambiguous before a single participant walks in.

Hard-won rules worth knowing in advance

A handful of rules sit outside the eight elements but shape the preparation decisions above. They are stated forcefully in the literature for a reason: each one names a way the method has been watered down in the past and stopped working.

Never online. The four conditions for effective communication — openness, basic psychological similarity, mutually shared field, trust — do not form through a screen. The method requires face-to-face.

Never multi-search in parallel. Parallel Search Conferences with a turnaround integration window fail roughly nine times out of ten. Use a series of Searches with an integration event at the end instead.

Don't lift one phase out of the sequence. A standalone Most Desirable Future without the environmental scan is wishful thinking. A standalone scan without integration is a news round-up. The integration and rationalisation phases only work when there is enough field to integrate over.

Don't call something a Search Conference when it isn't. The method has acquired enough cachet that the label gets attached to events that share none of its discipline. If the design calls for a shorter or partial event, name it honestly — a Contextualisation, a mini-Search, a Unique Design — and be clear about what it can and cannot deliver.

Why this phase is non-negotiable

Sixty years of fieldwork have produced a remarkably consistent finding: when a Search Conference fails, it almost always fails for reasons traceable to preparation. The sponsor was not really committed. The system was never properly defined. The wrong people were in the room, or the right people were not. The manager reached into a facilitator's toolbox when work slowed down. The implementation structure was left to sort itself out. None of these are content failures — they are setup failures.

The preparation phase is also why the Search Conference is not a quick intervention. Done properly it is months of work in service of two days in the room. The two days are where the visible product is built; the months around them are what make the product consequential.

The canonical sources

The chronological practice account — preparation, sanctioning, system definition, participant selection, timing, venues, numbers, the event itself, and the explicit "don'ts" list — is in Merrelyn Emery's Searching: The Theory and Practice of Making Cultural Change (1999), chapters 6 and 7. Peter Aughton and Merrelyn Emery's Sustainable Future Planning Handbook (2010) is the most accessible operational primer for community work and includes the four-phase event design and the appendix on the underlying OST theory. Both are the load-bearing references for the eight elements above.