The Surprising Power of Liberating Structures: Simple Rules to Unleash A Culture of Innovation (13 page)

As you grow more and more confident about your ability to be successful with Liberating Structures, your fears will lessen but never completely recede because unpredictability never goes away: your success will always come with many surprises. These are a big part of the satisfaction you will derive from using Liberating Structures. As you gradually push the envelope by including more people, more functions, and more levels, and by embracing more diversity, more surprising and exciting results will emerge.

Three Pathways to Fluency and Routine Use

Where you sit in an organization influences not only your first steps but also the subsequent paths you can take to develop fluency in the use of Liberating Structures.

For Senior Leaders

Senior leaders with resources can quickly engage many other people with workshops for some two hundred people at a time (see
Immersion Workshops
below) and they can also put in place mechanisms to encourage dissemination and to support a growing number of applications. A senior leader who personally becomes a visible regular user sends a powerful
invitation
to the entire organization to join in the experiment. From this, a critical mass can emerge to overcome the huge inertia of conventional practices that dominate existing work systems.

We use the word “invitation” purposely because we believe that it is not a good idea for leaders to use their authority to impose Liberating Structures. Instead, we advise creating opportunities for people to learn and allowing them to implement at their own pace and at their own level of comfort. We
believe that the use of Liberating Structures will best flourish when it is left to grow through the enthusiasm and energy of spontaneous adopters. So the role of leaders is not to impose but to provide lots of support where it is wanted and welcomed. In addition, they need to be regular users themselves for there is absolutely no other way for them to fully make sense of what Liberating Structures can contribute to the performance of their organization.

Leaders have many opportunities every day to start practices that can easily be copied by others in their organization. For instance, replacing conventional meeting agendas with “storyboards” will inevitably support the use of Liberating Structures since they always specify for each session not just its purpose but also the detailed structure that will be used to achieve the purpose.

The use of Liberating Structures spreads most effectively when people experience and discover what they make possible. For leaders, this means creating opportunities for people to be exposed to Liberating Structures in workshops or making it easy for people to learn them in partnership with others. It means supporting the development of communities of practice in all organizational functions so that people can easily network and learn peer-to-peer. It means encouraging experiments and disseminating news of both successes and failures.

Managers, Individual Contributors, Solo Practitioners

In contrast to senior leaders, managers, frontline workers, and professionals such as educators or nurses are unlikely to have access to a lot of resources. So their starting point will not be a workshop but a single application of one Liberating Structure or a small number of structures in connection with a meeting with their team or colleagues. In our experience, small but frequent steps, with a thorough debrief after each step, are the most effective way to proceed. We always advocate working with a partner as it makes the learning process so much more effective, faster, safer, and fun.

We are frequently asked, “I want to start using Liberating Structures myself, but how can I convince the people around me to start using them?” Our answer always is, “Don’t try to convince anybody, words will not do it but experiences will.” In other words, just use a Liberating Structure at your first opportunity and let those who like it learn from you. Then use your next opportunity, and the next, and so on. Let people discover and convince themselves of the value of Liberating Structures through the experiences you create.

Remember too that all new users of Liberating Structures have the potential to initiate a community of practice if they choose to. It starts with getting one partner and then being deliberate in attracting and supporting new users by offering assistance or by inviting them to observe. We have seen many instances where adopters of Liberating Structures have been asked to run small workshops as a way of spreading the practice—for example, two to three hours covering a few basic structures. Or they were asked to help with designing or facilitating a meeting. Spread can be spontaneous or planned.

Internal or External Consultants

For internal or external consultants with influence but limited resources, starting to use Liberating Structures in work with their closest clients is the most effective way to get started. As their experience builds, they will soon have to make a choice between keeping their new expertise for their own benefit or turning as many of their customers as possible into users. The latter obviously is the more powerful strategy, but it requires that the consultant become a coach and teacher in addition to a being a proficient user. This will translate into codesigning and co-facilitating with individual clients and will likely require eventually going beyond individual coaching by organizing workshops for small or large groups.

As the work progresses, it is likely to involve navigating up the organization in order to engage and get the support of leaders in more senior positions than one’s initial clients. It may not be an easy transition for a consultant to, as quickly as possible, hand off responsibilities for facilitating Liberating Structures to others. After all, this is like giving away one’s reason for existence and looks like a lousy business model. Who is going to need you if at every step you share your experience and invite new users to take over and expand their practice? While this may sound like a legitimate concern, the scope of what needs to be accomplished to help an organization get the full benefit of Liberating Structures is so vast that no single consultant is likely to run out of work. Expansion or promotion is the much more likely scenario. Ripples will turn into waves.

Especially for anybody who learns Liberating Structures by reading instead of direct experience,
1-2-4-All
is a very good place for a safe start (see description in the Field Guide or in
Chapter 3
). It is such an effective structure that any meeting would have to be exceptionally unusual not to offer at least one
opportunity for using
1-2-4-All
to good advantage. So start with this structure, and when you feel comfortable, try another. There are more than a dozen easy structures that are sufficiently simple to jump into and try out—for instance,
Troika Consulting; Impromptu Networking; Appreciative Interviews; What, So What, Now What?; Conversation Café; Nine Whys; Wise Crowds; 15% Solutions
.
Table 5.1
shows options for getting started from various organizational positions. See the Menu earlier in this chapter (
Figure 5.1
) for a quick overview of these Liberating Structures and then follow the discussion in the Field Guide or on
www.liberatingstructures.com
to translate into action.

The next step is for you to move up the boldness ladder by combining two or more structures. Then find others who love the work and share stories with one another. Experiment with Liberating Structures in as many aspects of your life as you dare to; they not only have a place at work but also at school, in your family, and in your social circles.

Immersion Workshops

Clearly, there are many ways to learn Liberating Structures and get started using them. We believe that one of the most efficient and effective ways—if it is possible—is to experience an Immersion Workshop. A Liberating Structures Immersion Workshop is like a foreign-language immersion course that temporarily relocates you away from a familiar culture. In an Immersion Workshop, you experience nothing but the language and practices of Liberating Structures. There are no presentations, facilitated discussions, updates, brainstorms, or open discussions. Having a team of people from your organization participate in an Immersion Workshop—or, even better, when the organization holds an Immersion Workshop in house—makes it possible for a critical mass to form around Liberating Structures, making it more likely that they will take hold and spread.

Liberating Structures are not difficult to learn, but
they need to be experienced
at least once to understand and believe what they can achieve. The reason is that their impact is counterintuitive because it cannot be explained by the logic of top-down command and control that dominates organization cultures. Fortunately, you can develop a practical understanding of most individual Liberating Structures in less than an hour each, enough to grasp them and then try them out with little risk. Taking this approach, Immersion Workshop participants repeatedly act their way into new thinking as they witness what can be accomplished when letting go of control with the support of simple but clear structures. Practice and debriefs with peers generate more confidence in the new methods. The participants discover the validity of the Liberating Structures principles personally rather than being told about them.

What’s the Purpose?

The purpose of an Immersion Workshop depends in part on whether participants are all from the same organization or come from different ones.

For Participants from the Same Organization

For participants from the same organization, these are typically the objectives:

By design, the Immersion Workshop is a quick, compressed model of all of the Liberating Structures principles. For example, one way that Principle #1, “Include and unleash everyone,” is brought to life is with the structure of the participant group: the workshop includes people from all layers of the organization and from the complete range of organizational functions. The makeup of the workshop group consciously mirrors what participants might want to emulate on the job when they start using Liberating Structures in their everyday interactions.

For Participants from Different Organizations

The purposes of an Immersion Workshop for people from many different organizations are:

With various organizations represented in the room, participants are exposed to many different ideas and to people who come from a variety of positions and fields. Unlike other types of public workshops, Immersion Workshops are not tailored for a particular audience, such as leaders or managers or HR professionals. Instead, they are constructed so that everybody can bring his or her challenge, with the idea that the more diversity in the participant group, the richer their experience.

In a multi-organization workshop, people see for themselves what can be accomplished in very diverse groups. Also, participants have a unique opportunity to enlarge their network of connections and find support for using Liberating Structures back in their own organizations. On the other hand, they miss out on key benefits of same-organization workshops: they must return to
organizations that have not experienced the power of Liberating Structures and will have to build credibility and critical mass to realize what might be possible in their actual work groups. A big plus, though, is that they learn how other organizations are experiencing and addressing the same chronic problems.

Whom to Include

Liberating Structures are about working together and they are best learned together. For an in-house workshop, include a diverse mix of leaders, managers, and frontline workers with shared interests. As long as a representative sample of the whole organization plus the entire management layer is included, it is possible for a group of any size to learn rapidly the approaches together—we have worked with close to two hundred participants in the same room. A typical invitation plan is illustrated in
Figure 5.3
.