I am an independent planning facilitator and management trainer, working in social and regional development in The Netherlands and EU. My experience is that social change is based on meaningful conversations between stakeholders in which they bring new ideas to each other. I started working (’79) in small scale irrigation in the Ecuadorian Andes region for a local NGO, and worked in Mozambique (‘85-‘90) in rural development and witnessed the collapse of the socialist experiment there. I worked as a project management trainer for MDF in The Netherlands, and got involved in facilitating participatory planning. We brought these ideas (with some success) to EU innovation programs, and to Project Cycle Management of the Commission (with less success). I have done work for government commissions, but I concentrated more on facilitating planning sessions in multi stakeholder programs. Today, I am involved in an initiative (www.beter-nu.nl) to stimulate co-operation in care delivery that was recently decentralized towards municipalities in The Netherlands.