essential-guide-to-qualitative-in-organizational-research

378 –––––––––– QUALITATIVE METHODS IN ORGANIZATION STUDIES ––––––––––––––––––complex multiple layered systems, is it also impossible for any single person to have the fullview (Emery and Purser, 1996: 95–6).OTHER PRINCIPLES AND THEORY UNDERLYING THE FC ––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––Three other significant principles, two derived from other areas of the social sciences and thethird from his practice, have also informed Emery’s approach to the search conference.Open systems theoryOpen systems theory provides a hugely important principle underpinning for the FC, andcontributes much to its potential effectiveness for enabling the research, design andimplementation of sustainable change in our uncertain, turbulent world. Emery used the workof biologist von Bertalanffy (1950) as his starting point. Bertalannfy’s basic premise of opensystems is that the world is made up of systems and environments. For any system to besuccessful, it needs to have an open, adaptive relationship with its environment which isdefined as everything outside its boundary. In order to survive and prosper, a system needs toopen itself to learning from its environment. Based on what the system learns about itsenvironment and what it knows about itself, the system plans for a future in which it will bothadapt to its environment but may also change its environment. Adaptive in this sense meansthe system and environment are in a constantly changing relationship in which the system islearning from and is affected by the environment and, likewise, the environment is alsoaffected and changed by the system. It’s a two-way street of mutual impact.This has much in common with the interpretation of ‘system’ in Walsh and Clegg’s softsystems analysis (Chapter 27). The main difference is that in the FC ‘adaptive’ means morethan just accommodating to change. In the FC people are trying to get a better grip on theirenvironment and see what can be done to change it for the benefit of the system.Creating the conditions for open dialogueFor the first FC at Barford, Emery and Trist’s primary concern was how to create theconditions for dialogue (Emery and Purser, 1996: 134). They turned to the work ofpsychologist Solomon Asch’s research on the conditions it takes for trust and open dialogueto occur among people. Asch’s view (1952: 78–131) was that trust starts to develop whenthree conditions are fulfilled: when discussion is open and all views are welcome, whenpeople feel they share similar perceptions of the world and when they feel they share thesame hopes and fears about the future. As this trust develops, relationships strengthen anddeepen, increasing the likelihood of mutual learning and community building. This is therock on which effective planning is based. In a nutshell, the FC sets out to build the planningcommunity.Rationalization of conflict and common groundFred Emery added this aspect some time after the Barford conference. He discovered it whilerunning another Search Conference in 1965, in Malaysia: focus energy on similarities and