The Surprising Power of Liberating Structures: Simple Rules to Unleash A Culture of Innovation (3 page)

If you are like most of the people we have worked with around the world, you experience some of these situations and events day in, day out. It doesn’t
matter whether we look at business, government, NGOs, education, health care, or community service—or neighborhood or civic groups, advisory committees, or similar organizations—these realities block most groups’ ability to work together to achieve remarkable results.

This book is an invitation to use the methods called Liberating Structures to organize and engage people in a new way. Too often, we rely on experts to design our world while overlooking the people directly in front of us. With the constellation of methods and principles explained here, it becomes practical for people at any skill or hierarchical level to quickly become expert contributors in taking next steps and innovating.

You can use this book to generate innovative results for yourself, with your family, with your team at work; these methods will work to improve your interactions with leaders in your organization and with neighbors in your community. Everyday use in a conversation or meeting can be as powerful as application to the big transformation initiative.

At the core of the book is the practical idea that simple shifts in our routine patterns of interaction make it possible for everyone to be included, engaged, and unleashed in solving problems, driving innovation, and achieving extraordinary outcomes. Small changes generate big results without imported best practices, more training, or expensive buy-in strategies. This alternative approach is both practical and feasible because, as you will see, Liberating Structures are quite simple and easy to learn; they can be used by everyone at every level, from the C-suite to the front line of any organization, from the neighborhood block club to the global issue-advocacy association. Rather than complicated frameworks or elaborate processes to guide work together, Liberating Structures employ simple rules that are extremely spare and very specific. Liberating Structures have been used by managers and salespeople, by doctors and nurses, by professors and students, by military officers and administrators, in business, government, and the nonprofit sector—all together in more than thirty countries. No lengthy training courses or special expertise is required. No dependence on expert facilitators is necessary.

What’s Ahead

We assembled this collection of Liberating Structures by tapping great ideas in the public domain, simplifying them, and adding a few of our own. Our purpose is to make all of the structures accessible for use by anyone from the bottom to the top of any organization. Whether you are a leader, facilitator, or part of any group of people who want to be more innovative, adaptive, and quick off the mark to achieve better results, this book shows you how to put the power of Liberating Structures to work immediately.

Part One: The Hidden Structure of Engagement
will ground you with the conceptual framework and vocabulary of Liberating Structures.
Chapter 2
introduces key concepts and contrasts Liberating Structures with the conventional ways of how people work together. In
Chapter 3
, we explain in more depth the features of Liberating Structures and show the benefits of using them to transform the way people collaborate, how they learn, and how they discover solutions together; also included in this chapter are two key performance indicators to assess what we are calling Engagement Expertise. The intent of
Chapter 4
, Liberating Leadership, is summed up in its subtitle: “How leaders can avoid perpetuating the problems they complain about.” Here we offer insights and alternatives to leaders at all levels.

Part Two: Getting Started and Beyond
offers guidelines for experimenting with Liberating Structures and learning from your experience in a range of possible applications, from one-off, small-group interactions to system-wide change initiatives.

Part Three: Stories from the Field
is a collection of real-life case examples provided by people who have used Liberating Structures around the world. Their stories unfold in all types of organizations, from health-care to academic to military to global business enterprises, from local judicial and legislative systems to national and international R&D efforts. They are snapshots of the depth and breadth of what Liberating Structures can make possible in a broad variety of situations.

In
Part Four: The Field Guide to Liberating Structures
, we give you a repertoire of thirty-three Liberating Structures. Each Liberating Structure is carefully designed to include only what is absolutely necessary to generate innovative results. The Field Guide provides the minimum specifications for each Liberating Structure (shortened to Min Specs) in a standard format so that they are easy to follow and easy to use. In describing how to use each Liberating Structure, we provide a step-by-step explanation of what to do and what to expect, including:

Throughout the Field Guide, we point you to a host of supporting materials on our website
www.liberatingstructures.com
to make it easy for you to start experimenting immediately.

In the
Afterword
, we share our thoughts about what it means for people individually and as a group to become regular users of Liberating Structures.

We believe Liberating Structures are transformational because they are purposely designed to make it easy to accomplish what is missing in most organizations, namely to include and engage people effectively and to unleash their collective intelligence and creativity. They provide a wide variety of ways to:

Most important, Liberating Structures are simple enough to fit within normal work routines and schedules. They can save enormous amounts time by making it possible to include all the right people from the start.

The thirty-three Liberating Structures included in this book can be combined in an infinite variety of designs that can be tailored to whatever needs to be accomplished. This makes them adaptable for shaping next steps in everything from personal relationships, to tomorrow’s meeting, to big projects, to strategic work, to organizational transformations, to social movements.

PART ONE

The Hidden Structures of Engagement

Part One contains the necessary background for working with Liberating Structures. We introduce the concept of Liberating Structures, contrast them with the conventional ways people work together, and describe how using them can transform the way people collaborate and discover solutions together. The last chapter speaks to leaders at all levels about why the strategies they use to address perpetual problems in organizations usually do not improve the situation and often make it worse. We propose the use of Liberating Structures as a proven way to get things done while overcoming perennial leadership challenges.

Chapter 2

Why Microstructures Matter

How invisible structures shape everything that gets done

One day, a CEO preparing for a merger spoke to a large group from the acquired company. He found himself totally unable to establish contact with the hostile crowd in spite of his repeated attempts to reach out. The next time he addressed the same group, he didn’t have any positive news to deliver, yet he was able to connect easily with them and even exchanged pleasantries that sparked laughter
.

The only thing the CEO did differently the second time was to change the physical structure where he interacted with the group. He moved the venue of his meeting from a long rectangular room to a square one. Then, instead of standing on a podium at one end, he stood in the middle of the group and moved around. This made it possible for him to engage people with stories and questions. Small structural change, big difference in content!

Whatever we
do
, there is always a structure to support or guide what is being done. Without structures, there is just chaos. We see this even in our most routine activities. When we have dinner with our family, the structure is provided by the room, the table and chairs, the dinnerware and eating utensils,
and more subtly by who sits where. Most of the time, we pay no attention to this structure because its elements rarely change. What we notice is what matters to us: the food, our dining companions, the conversation. We take the structure for granted and don’t even think of changing it to transform our dinner.

The same happens at work or at school. We know that big structures such as buildings, strategies, policies, and processes support and constrain our activities, but we are not constantly aware of their influence. We tend to be even less conscious of the way smaller or intangible structures—such as the room we select for a meeting or who sits where—influence our interactions with other people. All sorts of structures shape all our undertakings and accomplishments, and we will explain how and why.

First, a Few Definitions

Buildings, strategies, policies, organization structures, and core operating processes are examples of what we call
macrostructures
. They are built or designed for the long term and can’t be changed easily or cheaply.

In contrast, meeting rooms, offices, presentations, agendas, questions, and discussions are examples of
microstructures
. They are the small structures that we select routinely to help us interact or work with other people. They can be changed easily from one event to another or even in the moment.

Tangible microstructures
are the physical spaces where interactions or work takes place. They are like the room where the family eats dinner. They also include how we choose to arrange the tangible
structural elements
within that space, such as tables, chairs, flip charts, and the like.
Intangible microstructures
are how we micro-organize our interactions with elements such as agendas, presentations, processes, discussions, questions, seating arrangements, and so forth.
Table 2.1
shows some examples for each type of structure.

For most organizations, the familiar microstructures become fixed in routine—the usual meeting room, who sits where, the use of PowerPoint presentations, the format of discussions. Since they are so often the same, they fade into the background and go unnoticed. In fact, when we started our work together, these small structures didn’t even have a name. We coined the term “microstructures” to make talking about them easier.

Microstructures may sound like small things, but they have a big impact. Consider three different configurations for a group meeting: long rows of rectangular tables, clusters of small round tables, chairs with wheels but no tables. Each one will enable and constrain in a different way what is possible for the group to accomplish. More subtly, questions will do the same thing. Asking, “Why is our customer strategy failing?” will launch a search for solutions in a different direction from asking, “When and how have you been successful in satisfying a customer?” Both questions enable searches, but each question constrains the range of appropriate answers.