Janoff, Sandra: Enabling Whole System Change in Organizations and Communities Around the World

Sandra Janoff lives and breathes the principles and practices of Future Search. She enables large diverse groups of people, in organizations and communities, right across the world, to create and act on their shared future. She repudiates the need to tell people what they should do or diagnose their organizational problems. She shows how groups with the right diversity of people, working from their own knowledge and experience, can find solutions to even the most seemingly intractable problems. Sandra has an academic understanding of the science of systems, individual and group psychology, and calls on that expertise to work nontraditionally with groups in organizational and social settings. She considers meetings the unit of change in our society – the place where all our social, economic, and technical decisions are made. She has created and demonstrated practices that explain how structure is a determinant of people’s behavior and how working with structure enables change on all levels. She shows how paying attention to the dynamics of the group is a responsibility of both leaders and facilitators and learning how to work with those dynamics lies at the heart of effective systems change. She co-founded Future Search Network, a dedicated community of practitioners who serve communities around the world for whatever people can afford. This chapter introduces Sandra’s contribution to the world, the people who influenced her, and the skills she has shown in making profound transformation accessible to everyone, everywhere.