ABSTRACT
This chapter describes 'Future search conference' and 'Open space technology' – two well-established models of whole-system events. A whole-system event is a conference where large numbers of people learn together and move the whole story along. It 'gets the whole system in the room'. 'Future search' is useful for stakeholders to discover shared intentions, to create a shared future vision for their organisation or community, and to implement a shared vision. 'Open space' enables self-organising groups to deal with complex overlapping issues and develop sets of co-ordinated action plans. Leader can read about this in Open Space Technology – A User's Guide. Open Space Technology method allows hundreds of people to self-organise. It is especially good at moving forwards issues that people from different backgrounds agree to be important, but for which no one has 'the answer', and indeed there are multiple complementary 'answers'.
