While the empty chair is typically used on a day-to-day basis, when an organization faces a major inflection point, there are a number of more elaborate processes that can help large groups of people to listen in jointly to their organization's purpose and sense of direction. These processes include Otto Scharmer's "Theory U," David Cooperrider's "Appreciative Inquiry," Marvin Weisbord and Sandra Janoff's "Future Search," "World Café," "Liberating Structures" and Harrison Owen's "Open Space."

These processes are non-hierarchical and self-organizing. They often bring the "whole system" into the room: all colleagues of an organization, whether a few dozen, hundreds, or thousands, come together for a working session of one or several days. Clients, partners, and suppliers can be invited to join, to add their perspective to the inquiry. Each of these processes comes with its particular format, but they have one thing in common: they achieve the unlikely feat of giving everybody a voice (even when thousands of people are involved), while at the same time channeling these voices toward a valuable collective outcome.^[6]