The Surprising Power of Liberating Structures: Simple Rules to Unleash A Culture of Innovation (22 page)

Alison Joslyn was the general manager of a global corporation’s Venezuelan subsidiary when she turned to Liberating Structures to turn her unit around. In just one year, the unit went from lagging to leading the industry on key performance metrics
.

Alison’s unit had tumbled in market position and growth. There had been product-supply challenges, loss of market share, and competitors ascending in customer perceptions. Employees had become discouraged and it showed in their satisfaction scores.

Enter Alison’s change initiative, initiated and sustained by a selection of Liberating Structures. “One year later,” she says, “all the performance metrics were going in the right direction. We were hitting it out of the park. We became number one in growth in Venezuela. Our internal culture survey score was now ultrahigh.”

Engaging everyone in a change initiative was uncharted ground for Alison, a notion not even covered in her management training. In fact, her experience in graduate school made her doubtful of the benefits of broad participation: “Working as a team was an encumbrance. It seemed so hard and frustrating without adding much value. I would rather do it myself. I was rewarded for my work as an individual.”

To address the challenge in Venezuela, she started to search for approaches. As luck would have it, the VP of the Latin American region was starting a new experiment. “I got myself invited to the weekend leadership retreat for regional and country leaders,” she recalls. “The bottom-up approach to include and unleash everyone was a good fit for our situation. A few months later, we started with an
Open Space
meeting for all 250 employees.”

Opening Space + Strong Leadership

Alison’s
Open Space
meeting was a dramatic beginning. More than seventy projects to support the turnaround were unleashed, many from frontline employees exercising unexpected leadership. Although Alison and the management team were not comfortable with all the projects, they were thrilled with the unbridled enthusiasm and initiative.

In the meantime, Alison attended a Liberating Structures workshop in Brazil and came back with even more ways to build on the success of the initial
Open Space
. With the seventy project leaders, Alison developed
Min Specs
to constrain and enable self-organization. Still, it was messy. Out of seventy projects, seventeen garnered formal support, and ten of those were able to live within the
Min Specs
over the next six months.

“While excitement was spreading person to person, I took a very firm stance. I very deliberately fanned the flames,” Alison told us. “Liberating Structures would not be a one-time thing.” She extended the use of Liberating Structures to her own management team meetings, the development of marketing strategies, the big sales convention, and eventually to interactions with customers. “It could have stopped with the successful
Open Space
meeting, but I insisted,” she says.

Waves of Internal Then External Experiments

Improving performance and integrating Liberating Structures into the business came in waves, with different functions and levels adopting different Liberating Structures at their own pace throughout the organization. First up was the sales convention. One-way PowerPoint presentations and formulaic sales training had dominated the traditional convention. The introduction of lively Liberating Structures approaches sparked fresh enthusiasm and engagement.

Hesitantly at first, marketing and sales directors brought the interactive Liberating Structures methods they had experienced into everyday work. Respected managers in marketing tried Liberating Structures first. One product manager used a
Conversation Café
in an evening meeting with customers, a highly educated professional group. Typically, the meeting would have included a dry PowerPoint lecture, brief Q&A, and dinner. The
Conversation Café
produced true engagement for the first time: BlackBerries never came
out, and peer-to-peer and generalist-to-specialist exchanges were collegial and full of learning.

The sales force soon got into the act. Everyone in the sales department was organized top to bottom in a tightly controlled hierarchy and not expected to embrace the new methods quickly. However, after a major meeting using
1-2-4-All
,
User Experience Fishbowl
, and
Conversation Café
for the first time with physician customers, the sales reps started to hear back from influential doctors. The customers loved the new meetings. They wanted more. They wanted to learn Liberating Structures methods to apply in their own work.

“There were stories that competitors were trying to copy our success,” Alison told us. “Soon, the sales director and, more importantly, the first-level sales managers were ‘all in.’ Everyone followed.”

Other experiments were unfolding. Alison and the HR director coached others on the management team. In pairs, they used
Design StoryBoard
to sketch out Liberating Structures-inspired agendas to formulate strategy. To build on early successes, the management team wanted a bigger splash. They designed a “Liberating Structures basic training” session for all product managers and sales managers.

The basic training workshop started with a familiar work assignment: design a successful new product launch. No particular process or Liberating Structure was suggested. The autopilot pattern showed itself. Very large groups formed. A few individuals dominated. Quiet people retreated. Relatively weak ideas were put on flip charts. There was very little collaboration among groups.

The second session of the workshop gave participants the same assignment with a twist: design a successful launch for the same new product with using one or more Liberating Structures. The results were like night and day.
1-2-4-All
drew out many more good ideas than the previous approach to the assignment, and
TRIZ
helped make space for unexpected innovative strategies. The participants felt they contributed and were part of the product launch moving forward. In all, they used six Liberating Structures. They had liftoff!

Social Proof Arrived before Business Results

Looking back, Alison recalls, “Spread was happening at all levels.” But what did it all mean? “Social proof preceded conventional proof,” she says. “I was looking for early indicators: Did many perspectives come out? Are people high-energy? Are groups mixing? Are Blackberries tucked away? Is the top group working as peers? And, are sales reps helping each other?” Alison looked for little things that suggested a bigger turnaround.

Importantly, Alison could also sense changes in the company’s relationship with customers. “I sat in the back of the room for our first meeting with sixty general-practice physicians,” she says. “They were leaning in and listening intently. The questions were practical, about real concerns. Not the usual ‘I am smarter than you’ comment. There was freedom to explore and interact at a deeper level.”

At first, there were worries that expert presenters would experience a loss of power and prestige: they were not invited to give the traditional lecture. Surprisingly, the specialist-experts also appreciated the freedom to explore the deeper and more practical questions facing nonexperts. Everyone rolled up their sleeves.

“Several months after the meeting,” Alison recalls, “one specialist presenter called me over. She told me it had been the most amazing experience. ‘At first I felt exposed, then elated,’ the presenter said. ‘If you do that again, I would love to be included.’”

The takeaway from customers: Alison and the management team had learned that the customer response to Liberating Structures was no different from what they had seen inside their organization. Nine months of internal experience made it possible and relatively comfortable to leap into customer experiments and reach new levels of engagement and commitment.

But wait. There’s more. For Alison herself, the experience with Liberating Structures caused a genuine transformation. “Forever, the turnaround changed my way of leading,” she told us. “Management is not always about being smarter. I now know that I can drive a business by engaging everyone from the mail guy all the way up. It is practical and powerful to hear every voice.”

Transforming After-Action Reviews in the Army:
Lisa Kimball

The US Army has a longstanding practice of using After-Action Reviews (AAR) to debrief troops returning from combat duty. This story shows how a simple Liberating Structure—the
Users Experience Fishbowl
—replaced a traditional army structure and yielded deep understanding of what deploying troops would be facing in the theater of war.

In a typical AAR, each officer is interviewed individually by multiple organizations over a thirty-day period. The process is closely controlled—detailed, precise, and demanding. The interviewers collate, analyze, and summarize the information. It is then incorporated into briefings provided to the troops entering the war theater, typically via PowerPoint lectures.

In this story of Liberating Structures in action, field officers returning from Afghanistan were going to be interviewed to transfer their specialized knowledge to the people who would replace them. The information thought to be particularly useful to the deploying soldiers was the returning officers’ experience in developing trusting relationships with women in Afghan villages. With trusting relationships at the local level, soldiers were able to generate better information to fight the war and possibly dampen the Taliban’s efforts to recruit successfully.

Lisa Kimball, PhD, the former president of the Plexus Institute, a nonprofit organization focused on applying ideas from complexity science to solve social and organizational problems, started using Liberating Structures methods in the mid 1980s, with online networking visionary Frank Burns. She has shown clients in government agencies, corporations, nonprofit organizations, and educational institutions just how simple and powerful Liberating Structures like
Users Experience Fishbowl
can be
.

Transferring On-the-Ground Know-How

Here’s how it happened. Lisa had started introducing Liberating Structures in an army leadership program for officers called Starfish Adaptive Leadership.
²
Given the program’s focus on action and learning in complex environments, Liberating Structures were included to help officers exploit opportunity and continuously learn in situations where they are in charge but not in control.