The Surprising Power of Liberating Structures: Simple Rules to Unleash A Culture of Innovation (10 page)

Leaders may be more or less inclusive, directive, or authoritarian, but they still end up using mostly the same practices. This explains why changes in leadership or organizational restructurings usually make no difference, because in most cases these routine practices remain the same: unaffected.

Over the years, the dysfunctions turn into norms; they are not seen as consequences of leadership and work practices but as standard defects of all organizations. It is quite common to explain them away by blaming “imperfect employees.” Another common rationalization is, “It’s the same everywhere.” Without visible alternatives to inspire them, there are no discussions of what might be.

Patching Up the Symptoms

If/since leaders don’t blame themselves, they don’t feel compelled to change their ways. Instead, solutions take the form of palliative programs that attempt to improve the symptoms without addressing their root causes. For instance, programs to motivate employees, instead of fundamental changes to avoid demotivating them in the first place (none of us was born with a demotivating gene). For instance, more wall charts posted in meeting rooms about running effective meetings, instead of fundamentally changing their meeting designs and methods of participation. For instance, massive reorganizations or system-wide training programs, instead of creating structures to make it easier for everyone to contribute his or her best.

So, on the one hand, it would be fair to say that leaders are to blame for the chronic problems of their organizations since they are perpetuating the practices that caused them. On the other hand, it is also fair to say that in fact they cannot be blamed because they don’t see any other practices being used around them. Everybody seems to be doing the same thing and having more or less the same problems. And lots of leaders have been quite successful and handsomely rewarded in spite of these problems. So why change? Why even bother looking for something else?

Here are some of the questions to consider.

If you answered yes to any of these questions, you need to strike at the root causes of dysfunctional teams, unmotivated employees, tedious and fruitless
meetings, and other side effects of conventional work practices in your organization. Take a close look at what follows.

The Good News

The good news is that command and control is not the only game in town; there are other work practices that are much more adapted to the challenges faced by modern organizations. These alternative ways of working together are designed to get things done while overcoming typical leadership challenges. From the start and in every interaction throughout your organization, you can build trust, engage everybody to participate and speak up, break down silos, invite people to contribute to their full potential, and reduce resistance to change. Our thirty-three Liberating Structures are purposely designed to accomplish these goals. They can be used by organizations to structure a wide range of their activities, from everyday interactions, such as meetings, one-on-one conversations, and small and big projects, to strategizing, change initiatives, and customer interactions.

In
Chapter 3
, we outlined ten Leadership Principles that become routine practices when Liberating Structures are used on a regular basis (
Table 4.1
).

This is how people can choose to relate to others for the purpose of creating successful organizations where people thrive, but principles are useless unless they come with the necessary know-how to turn them into reality. Liberating Structures provide the “how-to-do-it” that makes them come alive. In our experience, even leaders who most desperately want to be inclusive don’t know how to do it. When they discover Liberating Structures, they are thrilled to finally have in their hands practical ways to be the kind of leader they want to be.

Used routinely, Liberating Structures make possible the
practice
of a different form of leadership that can immediately yield tangible progress because it can be implemented at any level of activity. We emphasize the word “practice” because Liberating Structures are not ideas or concepts but concrete methods. With apologies for our lack of imagination, we call the form of leadership that uses these methods “Liberating Leadership.” If leaders can let go of command-and-control practices, they find this form of leadership to be inclusive, adaptive, and very productive. They also discover that it is rewarding and enjoyable. The individual and the group are liberated.

Table 4.1

Ten Liberating Leadership Practices

The Possibilities

Let’s illustrate by looking at the first principle since it is the most fundamental: “Include and unleash everyone.” At first glance, “including everyone” looks like a crazy idea since it is the total opposite of what the norm is, namely “be efficient and include the minimum number of people needed.” Until they see “including everyone” done with Liberating Structures and witness the benefits, the reactions we get from leaders when we talk about including everyone are raised eyebrows plus comments such as “impossible,” “impractical,” “would take forever to get anything done,” “we’d never get everybody to agree,” “would cost a fortune.” They are right! This is what they have seen happen when everyone is “corralled” with traditional methods/structures to implement decisions, or when initiatives are cascaded down their organization and large groups are brought together to be convinced and trained. Corralling, cascading, convincing, and training are time-consuming and expensive at any scale, but this is what most organizations are designed to do: make decisions above and implement below.

We always say that leaders don’t have a choice about whether or not to include everyone because eventually everyone that will be affected by any of their decisions will have to be included. Their only choice is
when
to include people and
how
to include them. Traditionally, the “when” is after the fact, when decisions have already been made and implementation has to start. The “how”
consists of structures designed for convincing, training, controlling, troubleshooting, overcoming resistance—and for getting the infamous “buy-in” that is supposed to guarantee successful implementation.

The Liberating Leadership practice we advocate is to
include people before the fact
so that they can participate in shaping decisions and programs that affect and implicate them. It is only because Liberating Structures make it possible to do this effectively and economically that we can advocate such a practice. Once people get over the mental obstacle that including everyone is not practical or possible, the benefits of such a practice are not difficult to imagine. It is obvious that, at a minimum, commitment and preparedness for implementation will be greatly increased. Resistance to change will melt through the gradual process of cocreation. Crowdsourcing will strengthen the quality of decisions and programs. Entirely new ideas are more likely to emerge from the vastly larger number of interactions and discussions. Finally, shared ownership will get participants much better prepared for adapting decisions to changing circumstances and making course corrections as needed.

The longer-term benefits of early and systemic inclusion are easy to imagine. Entirely new professional and social connections will be built between people of different functions and levels. These will inevitably strengthen the fabric of the organization and reduce the silo tendency. With deeper and more frequent interactions, people will get to know each other much better. Trust will grow because, if for no other reason, there are many more chances for the untested assumptions that routinely get in the way to now be exposed and revised. Trust will grow because Liberating Structures constantly create a big variety of small spaces that make it easy for people to speak up and interact safely with each other, and to discover how they not only can work more effectively together but also help each other. Trust will grow because people will
experience
that they are more successful together than separately. Trust will grow because, with Liberating Structures, people will enjoy their time together much more than with traditional methods.

As trust grows, it creates channels for authentic feedback to flow upward and sideways. This has enormous implications for the productivity of any organization and for its ability to reduce or avoid costly mistakes. Organizations as a whole are smart and well informed about what the problems are. However, that information and intelligence is widely fragmented and doesn’t flow spontaneously up to the decision makers. Liberating Structures can change that pattern.

Liberating Structures create opportunities for many more people to make influential contributions. Anytime they do, they are acting as leaders however temporarily or briefly it may be. In that way, Liberating Structures distribute leadership without taking any of it away from the formal leaders. Instead, they reveal latent leadership that under traditional practices would not be given the opportunity to manifest itself. They liberate leadership in every person, so to speak.

The Choice

You have a choice: continue using traditional work practices and struggle with their chronic side effects or experiment with practices designed to avoid them. You can be the main force in deciding to maintain the status quo or the main force in showing and paving the way to a dramatically different set of results.

Liberating Structures are easy to learn and to use, but they require breaking some longstanding habits. Nothing particularly difficult is involved, but, still, you might have to move out of your comfort zone. For instance, in your regular meetings, there are probably established patterns about who sits where, how agenda items are handled, how discussions are directed. Liberating Structures will change these patterns. To make space for other people’s contributions, your role and participation as a leader will have to change.

Getting started may feel clumsy. You will have to get up from your usual chair, move around, use different methods to energize and inspire your team. These new structures will loosen your usual level of control and invite you to become more transparent. They will mean that others have to get out of their comfort zones too. This is what Michael Gardam, Alison Joslyn, Jon Velez, and others describe in their stories in
Part Three
.

If you decide to change your ways, you will soon see how Liberating Structures improve your performance and the performance of the various groups that you lead or chair or participate in. Indeed, Liberating Structures will change the performance of any group by changing the quantity, quality, and depth of the interactions within it. The formula is quite simple: the same group with better interactions will perform better, often surprisingly better.

Let’s face it, it’s common for leaders to think that, in the short term, they are stuck with the way a team or unit is performing because they assume that the only way to improve performance is to replace people or to train them. Since both of these changes take time, and are out of the question in the moment, it’s easy to
understand why leaders feel stuck. Fortunately, it is possible for a group to generate surprisingly better results without replacing people or training them to change their behaviors. Changing the structures used by the group to transform the way its members interact and work together can do it. What’s more, it can be done literally in the moment. Shifting structures is the only practical option for improving performance in the short term. With Liberating Structures, leaders can accomplish that shift quite easily and stop being stuck with inferior performance.

A Word to the Skeptic

At first glance, Liberating Structures may seem too easy, too simple, too straightforward, too effortless to achieve the kind of big changes that leaders are interested in, especially those in senior leadership positions. Liberating Structures may look nothing like the big, sophisticated interventions offered by famous consulting firms. Some may see them as trivial, not profound or interesting enough to warrant their attention.

Take a closer look and you will see that simplicity is the power behind Liberating Structures. Improving performance when using conventional structures is very difficult and demands lots of talent. But doing it with Liberating Structures is very easy because the structures spark improvements in performance automatically, by design. It is the structures that do the work, so to speak.