The Surprising Power of Liberating Structures: Simple Rules to Unleash A Culture of Innovation (4 page)

The Neglected Power of Microstructures

People, resources, and structures are conventionally seen as the three ingredients that drive the performance of all organizations. Simply stated,
people, supported by resources and macrostructures, make decisions and take actions that generate results
. Every organization is looking for the ideal formula, the precise combination of people, resources, and strategies that will produce top performance (see
figure 2.1
).

In
Figure 2.1
, “People” includes leaders and managers, the organization’s workforce, suppliers, and customers. For a school, the people would be board members, principals, teachers, administrators, students, and parents. As
Table 2.1
shows, “Macrostructures” would include factories, offices, or other buildings, as well as things like strategies, organization structures, policies, and procedures. “Resources” include products, services, patents, property, equipment, capital, and cash flow.

What is missing from
Figure 2.1
is the role microstructures play in shaping decisions, and affecting results since nothing ever happens without some form of interaction, some exchange of information, and some discussion, formal or not (see
Figure 2.2
).

Microstructures Enable and Constrain

Microstructures are the way you organize all your routine interactions, consciously or not. They guide and control how groups work together. They shape your conversations and meetings. They enable
and
constrain what is possible. For our purposes, we can say they come in two flavors: conventional microstructures and Liberating Structures. Liberating Structures are adaptable microstructures that make it possible for groups of people of any size to radically improve how they interact and work together.

Conventional microstructures, in one form or another, have been around for centuries. They are designed for convincing, teaching, debating, brainstorming, controlling, or some combination of these purposes. Their usefulness, however, is limited by side effects that are difficult or impossible to avoid, such as unengaged participants or audiences, excessive power dynamics, and competition for attention, bodies present but minds absent. The resulting frustrations spark much talk about the need for engaging employees (in academia, the talk is about engaging students), but, in actual practice, there is too little expertise on how to engage people effectively and broadly. Routinely uninspiring meetings, classes, or conversations reinforce the dominant belief that engaging people is very difficult and reserved for the charismatic few. Because of the perceived difficulty, the myth organizations large and small, the standard decision-making formula is: meet with a small circle of coworkers, decide, and then tell the others. The presentation, the managed discussion, the status report, the open discussion, and the brainstorm are the most frequently used conventional microstructures in group interactions—we call them the Big Five. They also shape one-on-one meetings and conversations. In fact, they dominate all activities in pretty much all organizations, small or large, no matter their mission.

Whether employed in a sales meeting, a managers’ meeting, an executive meeting, a customer contact, or a classroom discussion, the impact of the conventional microstructures is greatly dependent on the skills and personalities of their users. The reason is that, as structures go, they are either too tight or too loose in terms of how much control is exerted on the participant group. For example, presentations, status reports, and managed discussions are at one end of the spectrum: too tight. Open discussions and brainstorms are at the other end of the continuum: too loose. Each of these qualities—too tight or too loose—has its limitations. What’s more, all conventional microstructures make it impossible to engage more than a small number of participants. Liberating Structures make it possible to include and engage everybody, no matter whether the group is small or large.

The Elements of Control

All
microstructures—Liberating Structures and conventional structures—are made up of the same five structural elements (
Figure 2.3
). These elements determine how control is exercised over a group of people who are working together:

The invitation
provides direction in the form of a question or a request. In other words, participation in the group’s work together will depend on someone’s invitation, explicit or implicit, to listen or speak up, to contribute to an objective, and so on.

How space is arranged and what materials are used
refers to all the choices that can be made about the tangible and intangible elements such as tables, chairs, podiums, projectors, flip charts, where people are located, whether they are standing up or sitting down. These arrangements can contribute to the invitation but often conflict with it as, for example, when a large group is sitting classroom-style and people are invited to ask questions.

How participation is distributed
refers to how much time every participant will be given to contribute.

How groups are configured
refers to the freedom that exists to change the composition of a group—for instance, by breaking up into small groups then reconfiguring into another formation.

Every microstructure contains
one or more steps
, each with a specific purpose and
time allocation
.

Conventional Microstructures: Too Much Control and/or Too Little Structure

Liberating Structures are fundamentally different from conventional microstructures in the way they control and structure people’s interactions. Conventional microstructures tend to provide too much control of content or too little structure to include everyone in shaping next steps. To illustrate, let’s look at the three most frequently used conventional microstructures.

Presentation (or Speech or Lecture)

The Presentation is designed to make it possible for one person to tell and show the same information to many people simultaneously. Its purpose is to give one person full control about the content while restricting everybody else to listening … or not. Participation in shaping next steps is very limited, if present at all, in the Presentation structure.

The structural design of the Presentation is:

The Presentation is neither an inclusive nor an engaging process since a single person controls the content. Furthermore, that person is the “expert,” the one who has prepared and is intimately familiar with all details. Participants are “forced” into a silent role that, instead of engagement, may invite passive
acceptance, defensive reactions, or withdrawal. When the Presentation is used to convince or persuade others of a predetermined idea or decision, it tends to discourage engagement and spark resistance. In a time-constrained agenda, time allocated to the Presentation means time stolen from group interactions. When the Presentation takes up most of the time available, it becomes the dominant structure and sets the tone for the whole meeting (same thing for a class dominated by lectures).

Open Discussion

An Open Discussion is one that is not managed or facilitated. It can have many different purposes: to collect feedback, share viewpoints, attempt to reach a consensus, allow people to ventilate, create the illusion of inclusion, search for new insights.

The structural design of the Open Discussion is:

In contrast to the Presentation, the Open Discussion operates with very little control of content, if any. If used to engage people in shaping direction, it easily turns chaotic, becoming too unconnected to be productive or too random to shape decisions or next steps. As groups get larger, Open Discussion becomes less and less open for all as a few people will inevitably dominate the discussion. In short, the Open Discussion has too few or too weak microstructural elements to provide everyone a chance to shape next steps. In simpler
terms, Open Discussions easily turn into a mess. This usually incites someone with authority to take control and manage the discussion.