The Surprising Power of Liberating Structures: Simple Rules to Unleash A Culture of Innovation (20 page)

In the case examples here, you will meet a lawyer, a business executive, a professor, a legislator, a nurse, a doctor, a student, and others who discovered how to put Liberating Structures into practice and accomplish extraordinary results. Their stories were chosen to show how simple it might be in your situation to choose one or more Liberating Structures to introduce into your daily work and reap the benefits of broader inclusion and greater collaboration with people at all levels of your organization.
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As you will see, these stories unfold in all types of organizations, ranging from health-care, academic, and military organizations to global business enterprises, local judicial and legislative systems, and national and international R&D efforts. They illustrate the depth and breadth of what Liberating Structures can make possible in a broad variety of situations.

Each story shows how a leader applied Liberating Structures to help achieve an ambitious goal—from passing legislation to preventing deadly infections to turning around a business. Despite hosts of obstacles and
naysayers, these leaders summoned the energy and courage needed to beat a path forward where there was none. Experimenting with Liberating Structures, they successfully included many others in shaping next steps. Along the way, they discovered a better way to organize.

We chose these twelve stories not only to show the range of what is possible with Liberating Structures but also to illustrate how Liberating Leadership emerges in the process. All the protagonists invited everyone to take action or make a contribution. Few decisions were predetermined and formal authority was used sparingly. Rigid old ways were creatively destroyed to make space for innovation. With surprising twists and turns, better-than-expected results materialized.

Here is a summary of the stories and the challenges taken on with Liberating Structures:

Fixing a Broken Child Welfare System
—Tim Jaasko-Fisher

How diverse stakeholders, accustomed to adversarial interactions and cynicism about system change, work across functional boundaries to solve chronic problems.

Inclusive High-Stakes Decision Making Made Easy
—Craig Yeatman

How inclusive leadership can also be bold and decisive.

Turning a Business Around
—Alison Joslyn

How a leader successfully invites everyone in an organization to take more responsibility for turning around a business.

Transforming After-Action Reviews in the Army
—Lisa Kimball

How standardized training by experts is used in concert with what can be learned directly from people with field experience.

Inventing Future Health-Care Practice
—Chris McCarthy

How hard work, technology, imagination, and a novel form of collaborating bring something really new into being.

Creating More Substance, Connections, and Ideas in the Classroom
—Arvind Singhal

How a professor succeeds by transcending “the sage on the stage” pedagogy.

Getting Commitment, Ownership, and Follow-Through
—Neil McCarthy

How to pick up the pace of shared decision making and follow-through among diverse leaders in a multinational business.

Inspiring Enduring Culture Change While Preventing Hospital Infections
—Dr. Michael Gardam

How it is possible to solve a big entangled problem and make enduring cultural changes simultaneously.

Dramatizing Behavior Change to Stop Infections
—Sherry Belanger

How serious and chronic challenges can be successfully addressed with playfulness.

Developing Competencies for Physician Education
—Dr. Diane Magrane

How doctors and researchers can follow and lead simultaneously when success requires everyone to discover together what is working and also make changes together.

Passing Montana Senate Bill 29
—Senator Lynda Bourque Moss

In the unforgiving world of legislating, how it is possible to succeed by building on what is currently working and the aspirations of constituents.

Transcending a Top-Down Command-and-Control Culture
—Dr. Jon Velez

How it is possible for a leader to responsibly let go of control in a way that shifts the culture of an IT organization.

Fixing a Broken Child Welfare System:
Tim Jaasko-Fisher

“Child welfare law is a high-stakes field that can literally mean life or death for a young child,” says Tim Jaasko-Fisher, a young lawyer using Liberating Structures to change a broken child welfare system.

Tim Jaasko-Fisher is a young lawyer passionate about transforming child welfare law. His dedication to the work comes in part from the empathy he feels for the people trapped in a system that is not working well, either for those administering the system or for its intended beneficiaries
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The child welfare system is intended to help families and children in abuse and neglect situations. But, Tim says, “resources are often divided into silos despite the fact that virtually everyone working in the field acknowledges that solving the problem requires cross-discipline collaboration.” He believes that local solutions are the best bet for fixing the system, and that they will come from the people doing the work. Working out of the University of Washington Law School, Tim relies on Liberating Structures in enabling court systems to unleash cross-functional and interprofessional innovations in serving children and families. One example is a conference session he designed for a group of participants representing all the silos in the system.

Composing a Workshop for Leaders

The people in Tim’s workshop embodied all the functions involved in children’s welfare work: judges, lawyers, court clerks, social workers. And there were seventy of them. Getting such a large, diverse group together to talk with one another was a rare opportunity, and Tim wanted to make the most of it. His goal for the session was for that roomful of participants to think about their work in a disciplined way. It was an ambitious idea.

Tim recalls, “I had two types of participants: the-everything-is-being-done-TO-me participants and the engaged leaders who were looking for useful methods.” One participant summed up the everything-is-being-done-TO-me stance succinctly: “What can you tell me: my court system is a boat that is on fire, under fire, and taking on water? What can you tell me to do?!”

It was clear to Tim that a rational intellectual framework would not be the most effective approach for this group of people. The second group, the engaged leaders, was interested in new approaches and understood that letting go of overcontrol might unleash more positive change. The Liberating Structures Tim chose for the session were intended to engage both groups and spark the system transformation that Tim and others believe is possible.

Tim used
Design StoryBoard
to draw out the overall intention of the session as well as the fine details of each segment. The storyboard included, for example, the method of interaction, a time allocation, a success metric, and illustrations. The design for the one-hour session included
Impromptu Networking
, a form of
Social Network Webbing
,
Agreement-Certainty Matrix
, and
1-2-4-All
.

Tim began the session with
Impromptu Networking
, not the expected lecture. He recalls, “This was not a level of interaction participants were used to in our field, particularly to start a conference. It set the tone that participants would do the work in this workshop and visibly raised the energy level in the room.” Participants had the opportunity to briefly share with three others
what leadership challenge they wished to make progress on that day, what they hoped to get from the workshop, and what insight they brought to the conversation.

Later, Tim walked participants through a
Social Network Webbing
. He believes this method is especially effective in helping isolated and disempowered people to experience the interconnectedness among the various levels and functions in the court system. “Oftentimes, there is not a high level of agreement as to what should be done in a case,” he told us, “and the legal portion of the case is seated in a process that is designed to be adversarial by its nature, making collaboration difficult at times.”

The mapping process helped the participants visualize a pathway that would lead from their isolated position to a collaborative network of people committed to the same issue. It also helped people see how they could be successful without authority over the entire process.

Later in the session, Tim asked participants to indicate how engaged they had been in the workshop by raising or lowering their hands: a hand down to the knees meant not at all engaged and above the head meant very engaged. Out of seventy participants, not one hand was below shoulder level, and one judicial officer actually stood on his chair to get his hand higher.

In a final segment, Tim asked people to decide if the leadership challenge they identified earlier was simple, complicated, complex, or chaotic. He invited participants to distribute themselves across the room to illustrate the range of challenges. People standing in the front of the room indicated a simple problem; at the back of the room were the people representing chaotic challenges; and the complicated- and complex-problem people arranged themselves in between. This gave everyone a graphic and memorable representation of the distribution of the types of problems the group faced.

Most of the problems were situated in the realm of complicated and complex, and a
1-2-4-All
exercise ignited a conversation about the leadership skills needed for each type of challenge. The group noted that as you moved toward the back of the room—from simple to chaos—the degree of social interaction necessary to address the issue increased. Simple problems could largely be solved with authority and expertise, but complex problems required social interventions, consensus, and dialogue skills. Tim’s intention and design for the workshop made it possible for the group to discover this insight for themselves.

Reflections on Design StoryBoard

Clearly, the constraints of a
Design StoryBoard
drive Tim’s creativity. “A storyboard helps me and others see patterns in meeting segments,” he says. “Redundancy and boring patterns are revealed. Talking about collaboration while listlessly watching PowerPoint presentations will not do!”

That workshop was just the beginning. Tim’s goal for law students and stakeholders in the court system is to take more responsibility for their own learning. Apathy is the enemy, Tim believes. When working with stakeholders on a design, he says, “Open boxes in the storyboard move the process forward without my intervention in a way that engages all those participating.” Tim fervently explains: “The answers are not scripted. The gestalt and aesthetic of the interaction is revealed. I ask more of myself and more of the people working in the court system.” He says it’s as simple as asking, “You tell me: what should go in the box?”

Inclusive High-Stakes Decision Making Made Easy:
Craig Yeatman