The Surprising Power of Liberating Structures: Simple Rules to Unleash A Culture of Innovation (11 page)

Liberating Structures produce big results easily because you do not have to depend on the talents or expertise of individuals to get engagement. You replace individual talent with microstructures specifically designed to tap into the organization’s collective intelligence and get big things done. You stop trying to achieve results by dragging people along or transforming them individually. Instead, you accept people as they are and use the appropriate structures to enable them to feel eager to work and contribute their best. You discover that people transform their behaviors of their own free will in ways that no external influence, expert, or training course ever could.

Liberating Structures produce big results because they
are
simple. If they weren’t simple, nobody would use them. If they couldn’t fit easily within people’s work, schedules, and time frames, they wouldn’t be used. It is because they are simple that everybody in the organization, from top to bottom, can start to apply them in virtually all of their interactions from day one. When that happens, the cumulative impact of all these simple changes is huge.

Think of the bamboo structures used as scaffolding for building in Asia. They appear simple and light, yet are amazingly strong; they can support putting up a skyscraper as effectively as constructing a small house. Our thirty-three Liberating Structures are like pieces of a bamboo scaffold. They can be combined and tailored for each specific construction to address any level of complexity. Learning to customize Liberating Structures designs to the specific purpose of each separate complex challenge is an art form that can be improved over a lifetime.

The Big Shift and Payoff

The big shift that comes from using Liberating Structures is more collaborative decision making and more crowdsourcing for solving problems or innovating and for developing strategies. Liberating Structures connect the doers and the deciders into productive assemblies.

With Liberating Structures, you expand the range of people included in making decisions and give a voice to those who were traditionally viewed as only “doers” or “implementers.” Conventional structures mean that, as a practical matter, the number of people who can be included in shaping the future is always way too small. Liberating Structures eliminate that constraint. Liberating Structures plus the use of modern technology mean that tens, hundreds, even thousands of people—instead of a small group or task force—can now effectively contribute their knowledge and talent.

However, giving up the “convenience” of making decisions in small groups behind closed doors is a big shift from long-established habits that often go back generations. It may not be the easiest thing to do and is likely to face strong resistance by those who resent losing their traditional privileges. Some may even find it impossible to accept this new level of participation and transparency.

The big payoff of course is that including a wide variety of people in day-today problem solving, decision making, and strategy development is the way effective leaders unleash the vast volume of contributions and innovations that lie hidden in their organizations.

The Biggest Leadership Challenge

People are the source of the greatest complexity and surprise in organizational life. Working together successfully requires all our intellectual, creative, and emotional talent.

However, the nearly universal approach to working together still revolves around centuries-old hierarchical practices. A small group decides and the vast majority is compelled to implement. Though well camouflaged in participatory jargon, authority continues to rule.

Think about why we are stuck in this way: The performance of groups of any size is determined by the quality of its members times the quality of their interactions. Leaders usually focus their attention on improving the quality of individuals. They find it frustrating and emotionally painful to deal with how individuals or groups interact with one another and therefore frequently avoid addressing frictions or conflicts.

What is difficult at the small-group level becomes excessively complex at the level of larger structures—the department, division, enterprise or block, neighborhood, community, country. That’s why avoidance is such a common short-term strategy; in other words, leaders just live with chronic dysfunctional relationships between people or functions because they don’t know how to change them. Common longer-term responses are to reorganize or to replace leaders in the hope that these changes will make the conflicts or dysfunctions disappear. In reality, it is impossible to know in advance what difference they will make. Too often, they don’t make any difference or, worse, they destabilize the organization and amplify the dysfunctions.

Yet, to build a high-performing organization, the quality of interactions between people is at least as important as the quality of the people themselves, if not more so. Take, for example, a sports team. It is easy to see that individual talent alone does not make a successful team. The quality of interactions and relationships is displayed on the field for everybody to see. The coach and players are evaluated on their ability to execute together as a team. Chemistry matters.

In organizations, the chemistry of interactions is often concealed or hidden out of sight. When Liberating Structures are used, they not only foster a big increase in the number and quality of interactions but they also make them visible. This visibility invites participants to pay attention to them, notice the differences, reflect, and make creative adjustments. Some Liberating Structures—such as
Generative Relationships, Ecocycle, What I Need From You—
are designed to diagnose relationship issues. Many others will nearly automatically generate improvements. Changes coming from within in this way are likely to make sense, build trust, and be long-lasting.

The best hope for transforming an organization is for the very people who will be implementing changes to “own” the changes, in this case the use of Liberating Structures. “Own” means that they have been included in their development, they understand them, they believe in them. They are therefore ready to implement them and to modify them as needed in the future.

Liberating Leadership Starts with You

Leadership is often a lonely spot, heavy with the weight of decisions and responsibility. It is easy to become at least partly isolated. While you cannot avoid accountability for making decisions, you can substantially change how decisions are developed and who is included in the process. Greater inclusiveness will affect the quality of your decisions and their validity. It will affect their implementation and your ability to respond quickly to the need for adjustments. It will liberate you from feeling all the weight on your shoulders. Inclusiveness will change the quality and the atmosphere of your meetings. It will change the quality of your work life. These benefits are your incentives for taking a serious look at Liberating Structures and experimenting with them.

Changing your own behavior and practices is the first step. Because it takes place when people meet and work together, using Liberating Structures is a public act and quickly visible; it will send powerful signals throughout the organization. The message will be that it is OK to replace long-held rigid traditions with some flexible new structures. When more people become included in everyday decision making and problem solving, it will be tangible evidence that “the times they are a-changin’” for real.

Liberating Structures spread through personal exposure and experience. It isn’t possible to imagine what they can contribute without direct personal experience. They spread because people appreciate what they do and enjoy the dynamic conditions they create. That is true at any level, all the way to the top. Leaders shouldn’t impose them or want everybody to be in lockstep. However, leaders who provide visible support and strong encouragement for the use of Liberating Structures will see them disseminate faster and more effectively and will reap the benefits of the changes they produce.

The most effective way to become aware of what is wrong with your conventional structures is to experience what happens when you use Liberating Structures instead. Just a few encounters with Liberating Structures in action
make entrenched, invisible, conventional microstructures become visible by offering contrasting ways for people to work together and achieve better outcomes. This visibility is a key success factor because organizations tend to be stuck in patterns that keep reinforcing themselves, and they are rarely aware of being caught in these vicious circles. Changing those patterns requires a break, a rupture, and a successful experience that is the first step of a new virtuous circle. A success that comes as a surprise is an invitation for trying again; if more success follows, it is encouragement for taking another step in a new direction.

There is only one way to learn what Liberating Structures are, what possibilities they hold, and how to use them: start experimenting with them in your everyday work. The Field Guide in
Part Four
is the place to begin to see what might be possible. What you can accomplish with the thirty-three Liberating Structures is limited only by your imagination. Combining many structures holds even greater possibilities. Putting them into practice today starts your journey toward liberating yourself and others around you.
Part Four
, Getting Started and Beyond, will make it easy for you to start to unleash the power of Liberating Structures.

PART TWO

Getting Started and Beyond

Part Two will make it easy for you to start to unleash the power of Liberating Structures. It is designed to guide your progress from using one or two Liberating Structures at a time to then stringing a few of them together and, finally, to composing elaborate storyboards for large-scale initiatives. It features:

CHAPTER 5

Getting Started: First Steps

Working with Liberating Structures may seem overwhelming or intimidating at first. How does one possibly master all those structures at once and know when and how best to use them? The answer is, you don’t. You don’t learn them all at once or ever use them all together. You learn one, you use one. You learn another, and then you might use one or the other or both. You get started with Liberating Structures the same way the old cliché tells you to eat an elephant: one bite at a time. Or, for another analogy, think of the way children master building with Lego bricks. First, they play around and learn to construct simple things like a tower or a simple cube. Then they tackle more complex structures like houses and bridges and castles. Next thing you know, they’ve built a whole city, or an airplane!

How you start using Liberating Structures will depend on the circumstances of your first exposure to them as well as your resources, your freedom of action, and your tolerance for uncertainty. We like the word “exposure” because Liberating Structures are like a fever. Most people who get exposed will catch the fever, and, as they use Liberating Structures in their daily work, they will expose others who will catch the fever too and spread it further. That is why the momentum of Liberating Structures can be started from any position in an organization, with or without resources, with or without position power. Here are a few vignettes to show how it can happen.

Larry was a hospital CEO who wanted to foster a dynamic and innovative culture. Since he had both authority and resources, he kick-started the use of Liberating Structures by sponsoring a two-and-a-half-day
workshop for the entire IT department plus clinical, HR, and financial leaders. All told, 180 people attended the workshop. In the three days after the workshop, Larry personally used fourteen Liberating Structures in meetings with his executive team, with physicians, and with his board
.