After a short warming up, we are listening to a panel discussion of four folks talking about sustaining change.

Pamela Thialt talks about a story from Frazer Health Authority in British Columbia, Canada, servicing 1.4 million people. They used large scale methodologies to engage stakeholders across different levels. Among other interventions, they designed a 2 days visioning conference about day, evening and night care, and another 2 days visioning conferences to create a strategic design for the deliverey of services to patients with Acquired Brain Injury. The latest intervention is the collaborative design of a new hospital, through series of conferences including design, transition and implementation. What is important for Pamela is they have succeeded to engage people in multi-stakeholder dialogues.

Other stories follow. We reflect back at our rounds tables in a group of 6. What emerges to me are the question:

a) Is the field (large scale interventions / whole systems change) still developing? Are there any emerging trends that we wouldn't have known 5 years ago?

b) Are we still focusing on tools rather than on change leadership?

A part of the answer is that facilitators are now paying more attention to what is emerging in the organization, adopting a much more chaordic and systemic perspective.

In the afternoon, I am participating an Open Space sesson convened by Sandra Janoff, the co-developer of Future Search Conferences, and one of the gifted facilitators in earth. Among others, she talks about the Asch Conditions for Effective Dialogue. Solomon Asch was a social psychologist who wrote a book in the fifties. Out of that came the conditions for enabling a design for effective dialogue. Asch made a favourite experiment:

The Asch conformity experiments, which were published in 1953, were a series of studies that starkly demonstrated the power of conformity in groups. These are also known as the "Asch Paradigm".

One of the pairs of cards used in the experiment. The card on the left has the reference line and the one on the right shows the three comparison lines.Experiments led by Solomon Asch asked groups of students to participate in a "vision test." In reality, all but one of the participants were confederates of the experimenter, and the study was really about how the remaining student would react to the confederates' behavior.

The participants — the real subject and the confederates — were all seated in a classroom where they were told to announce out loud their judgment of the length of several lines drawn on a series of displays. They were asked which line was longer than the other, which were the same length, etc. The confederates had been prearranged to all give an incorrect answer to the tests.

While most subjects answered correctly, many showed extreme discomfort, and a high proportion (32%) conformed to the erroneous majority view of the others in the room when there were at least three confederates present, even when the majority said that two lines different in length by several inches were the same length. When the confederates were not unanimous in their judgment, subjects were much more likely to defect than when the confederates all agreed. Control subjects with no exposure to a majority view had no trouble giving the correct answer. (from Wikipedia)

Out of that, Sandra extract the conditions for effective dialogue:
1) People can experience together that we are all living in the same world subject to the same forces
2) People have the same psychological needs
3) When we experience that together we can understand that your reality is part of our shared reality.

Sandra and Marvin Weisbord have defined 10 principles for designing meetings:
A. Leading the Meeting
1. Get the "right people" into the room
2. Control what you can - Let go what you can
3. Explore the whole "elephant"
4. Let people be responsible
5. Find common ground
6. Master the art of subgrouping

B. Manage Yourself
7. Make friends with anxiety
8. Get used to projections
9. Be a dependable authority
10. Say no if you want your yes to mean something