The Journal of Applied Behavioral Science

All organizations and communities are strongly influenced by factors and events that lie outside their boundaries. A shared understanding of these environmental influences—in the past and the present—has been an important aspect of popular large group interventions. Traditional scenario planning has long been a way of confronting uncertainty and complexity about the future of environmental influences. Large group scenario planning is an adaptation of traditional scenario planning. Meeting for 2 or 3 days, a critical mass of an organization or a community can use scenarios of the future environment to move beyond their natural tendency to think of the future as an extrapolation of the past. Ageneral method is described, and the use of large group scenario planning by the Boston University School of Dental Medicine is presented.

Transorganization development (TOD) is a four-stage model for improving collaboration in networks based on early research into successful collaborations together with input from an organization development (OD) practitioner base. However, this intervention has received surprisingly minimal empirical attention regarding its effectiveness, nor indeed any further conceptual development. This article provides some insights into the effectiveness of this intervention by analyzing the effects of the second stage of the model, the convention stage, which is a form of search conference. The intervention was found to facilitate problem solving and enabled a consensus to be reached to establish a new network planning structure. However, through integrating social network analysis with planned organizational change, itwas found that the most important outcomes of the intervention were its predominantly political effects.

This article explores the large-scale work of America Speaks in the public sector, engaging citizens in 21st Century Town Meetings in decisions that impact their lives. It first reviews the differences in practicing large group work in broader social systems versus more bounded organizational systems. It also reviews the core dimensions and principles of the AmericaSpeaks model followed by an examination of the use of these town meetings in land use planning, resource allocation, and policy formulation projects. Finally, the authors describe AmericaSpeaks’sintent to institutionalize the practice of national discussions on critical policy issues and highlight the work of other deliberative democracy practitioners over the past decade locally, regionally, nationally, and abroad.

Open Space and Future Search can be combined as related steps in a process of helping a community decide on its future. Doing so creates newways to address difficult situations that neither method may be able to handle as well on its own. Two specific case studies following a similar combination design are presented showing the complementary nature of both methods when used together. Some conclusions are offered on when to consider this combined approach.

This article describes an experimental alternative to months-long systems redesigns. In one meeting, the global furniture retailer, IKEA, applying the principle of “whole system in the room,” created a new structure and process for product design, manufacture, and distribution, decentralizing an agglomeration of “silos” that no longer served. Some 52 stakeholders examined the existing system, developed a new design, created a strategic plan and formed task forces led by key executives to implement it. In 18 hours, the plan was developed and signed off on by the company president and key people from all affected functions, with active support from several customers. Was this idiosyncratic to IKEA or repeatable anywhere? The authors hypothesize that oneway to change a system in real time is for those with critical stakes in it to share what they knowunder conditions that enable action without asking permission from anyone not present.

The World Café is a simple yet powerful conversational process that helps people engage in constructive dialogue, build personal relationships, foster collaborative learning, and discover newpossibilities for action. Café dialogues enable large groups, often hundreds of people, to think together creatively as part of a single, connected conversation. It has been used by tens of thousands of people on six continents in business, government, health, education, nongovernmental organization (NGO), and community settings. This article describes the range and spread of the World Café in Singapore as part of that nation’s effort to create a national learning culture and to transition from a top-down to a more open and inclusive society. In a multiracial and multireligious setting involving diverse national objectives and multiple levels of the hierarchy, the World Café is making a unique contribution to this young nation’s future.

Building relationships and developing understanding, trust, and collaboration in transcultural strategic alliances involve enormous challenges that have been well documented. Organization development (OD) technologies, including appreciative inquiry (AI), are uniquely suited to deal effectively with these challenges. Thus, two alliancebuilding OD interventions were implemented to develop relational capital in a U.S.-India biotechnology alliance. Substantive cultural differences existed between the alliance partners at formation, and the ways in which those differences influenced the design and implementation of the two interventions are discussed. Overall, AI as modified was found to support building relational capital. Six years later, the alliance continues to thrive; however, many of the same issues that hampered the effectiveness of collaboration and building of trust in the alliance still exist. Recommendations are offered for modifying the design of AI and other OD interventions to provide ongoing support for building successful transcultural alliances.

Based on the theoretical approach of Rogers’s diffusion of innovations model, the article examines the spread of large group interventions (LGIs) in German-speaking countries (Austria, Switzerland, and Germany) from 1999 to 2002. From this perspective, organization development consultants are the agents for diffusion of this new knowledge. An empirical study carried out in 1999 shows their status as innovators and early birds in the spread and diffusion of LGIs. A second study, carried out in 2000-2002 as a yearly trend survey, shows the tendencies of application and spread and the quantitative diffusion of LGIs in German-speaking countries thus far. They are successful in diffusion, but this success also carries its dangers: They might lose their clear shape and transformational power. They are hence to be analyzed with regard both to the risks of their success story and the promising myth of a fundamentally transforming experience.

There is a long literature and rich lore about the process of organization change and its engagement in large group intervention. This article takes a fresh look at this process through the lens of theater. It draws from a case study covering 5 years in a food business in Holland where a series of memorable events served to launch, guide, and punctuate a corporate transformation. The author, who contributed to some of these events, goes “behind the scenes” to illustrate how the performing arts can energize and deepen largescale change. Aseries of questions for practitioners aims to stimulate thinking about their own use of dramaturgy. The article concludes with brief consideration of the implications of change as theater for theory and practice.

This article describes an international, multicultural, interfaith event sponsored by the Council for a Parliament of the World’s Religions (CPWR) that integrated graphic facilitation as a design component to support deep dialogue and encourage constructive action by participants representing a considerable diversity of cultures, languages, and traditions of faith. The abundance of graphic professionals (10) was a unique feature of the event staffing. The event was a minilaboratory for insights into the effective application of graphics in a global large system initiative. Graphic work moved beyond recording “call out” statements from participants to more nuanced, reflective, and participatory representations of large and small group dynamics. Graphic facilitators applied seven distinct forms of graphic utilization with facilitators and participants. The addition of graphic facilitation to the more traditional methods of facilitationwas found to contribute significantly to participant engagement and sustainability.