Future Search, 3rd Edition

CHAPTER 15Future Search Research and Evaluation

This is a methodological minefield. No one can do “scientific studies” of Future Search until the rules of science are rewritten. So let us affirm our biases, buttressed by decades of evidence from countless others. People who observe the conditions for success in Chapter 3—the core principles and the insurance policies—get better results from task-focused meetings than those who don’t. Ample anecdotes, case studies, and academic theses support this claim. We can’t do controlled studies because no two situations are the same. Nor can we speculate on what would have happened had a given sponsor used another of the 60-plus large-group methods outlined in The Change Handbook (Holman et al., 2007). ...