The Surprising Power of Liberating Structures: Simple Rules to Unleash A Culture of Innovation (44 page)

“The future is already here. It is just not uniformly distributed.” William Gibson

• Invite participants to silently observe people with experience relevant to the challenge at hand and then follow up with interviews for more insight

• In a local setting (workplace, client organization, neighborhood) with a convenient space for sharing findings, photos, and videos
  
• Provide notebook, camera, video, permission (if needed)
  

• All core-group members working on a challenge are included as ethnographers
  
• Everyone has an equal opportunity to contribute
  

• In 1s or 2s distributed among sites being observed
  
• Whole group for debrief
  

• Explain the problem to be solved and the current understanding of the situation. 5 min.
  
• Identify
  sites to observe and people to shadow that will reveal user experience in depth. 5 min.
  
• Invite participants to visit sites and observe without speaking interactions and activities, recording details and internal reflections as they go. 10–180 min.
  
• Ask participants to then select behaviors observed that address the challenge in a novel fashion (in part or in whole) and follow up by asking the individuals they observed what they were feeling and doing as they engaged in the behavior. 20–180 min.
  
• Reconvene the group of ethnographers and use
  1-2-4-All
  to compare notes and find patterns across observations or exceptional solutions. 15 min.
  
• Write up observations or compose stories that highlight needs and opportunities. 10–20 min.
  
• Feed insights into brainstorming and prototyping efforts. 10 min.
  
• Repeat steps until the core-group members feel they have a particularly powerful new approach to prototype
  

• Help invisible routines become visible
  
• Identify fundamental needs and innovative solutions
  
• Reveal tacit and latent knowledge not accessible by asking users for explicit needs (e.g., with focus groups)
  
• Show respect and trust by observing and interviewing people on the front line
  

• Avoid adding meaning and interpretations too quickly to the observations
  
• Be prepared to repeat steps if the core-group members don’t feel they have a particularly powerful new approach to prototype
  
• Be aware that insight comes from inconspicuous, often overlooked details
  
• Focus
  on the intrinsic qualities; ignore material or technological hierarchy
  
• Look for what is irregular, intimate, unpretentious
  
• Look for comfort with ambiguity
  
• Don’t ignore what is imperfect, crude, or impermanent—deviance can be positive
  
• Do one or more rounds of simple ethnography after you implement your new approach
  

• Use a storytelling template to structure observations (e.g., the Hero’s Journey)
  
• Ask participants to draw or build a model of the challenge (be ready to be surprised by the deeper insights that nonverbal methods produce)
  
• Include clients in the observations (e.g., invite clients to record their own behaviors and share the images or video with the group)
  

• For sales representatives to discover how some of their colleagues are getting better results without additional resources or privileges
  
• For understanding how some clinicians are able to attend to the spiritual needs of patients and other are not
  
• For understanding why patients wander out of hospital isolation-precaution rooms despite repeated warnings
  
• For understanding how to reduce the patient falls in hospitals
  
• For understanding the differences between effective and ineffective meetings
  

Below: studying at the feet of people with local expertise via quiet observation and video capture in a Montana hospital

“There are two kinds of truth. There are superficial truths, the opposite of which are obviously wrong. But there are also profound truths, whose opposite are equally right.” Niels Bohr

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Invite your group to explore the questions, “Will our purpose be best served by increased local autonomy, customization, competition, and freedom among units/sites? Or, will our purpose be best served by increased integration, standardization, and control among units/sites? Or, both?”

• Chairs for people to sit in groups of 4, with or without small tables
  
• An “Integrated Autonomy Worksheet” for each participant and a large one on the wall.
  
• Paper for recording activities and action steps
  

• All central unit leaders and local unit leaders involved in the challenge at hand are included
  
• Everyone has an equal opportunity to contribute
  

• Individually to generate topics
  
• Small groups of 4
  
• Whole group
  

• Introduce the idea of
  Integrated~Autonomy
  for the topic at hand by asking, “How is it that we can be more integrated and more autonomous at the same time?” Have examples from past experience ready for sharing. 5 min.
  
• Use
  1-2-4-All
  to generate a list of activities that require attention by asking, “Where is there tension between our desire to standardize and the request for more customizing or autonomy?” 10 min.
  
• Ask participants to work in groups of four, and pick one activity from the list and ask, “What is the rationale for standardizing? What is the rationale for customizing?” 10 min.
  
• Using
  1-2-4
  develop action steps that achieve standardization. Using
  1-2-4
  , develop action steps that achieve customization. 10 min.
  
• Ask, “Which actions boost
  both
  standardization (group A)
  and
  customization (group C)?” See worksheet below. 5 min.
  
• Ask, “What modifications or creative ideas can be adopted to move some actions from group A to group B or from group C to group B?” See worksheet below. 15 min.
  
• Using
  1-2-4-All
  , prioritize the most promising actions that promote
  both
  integration
  and
  autonomy. 10 min.
  
• Refine action steps by developing some effective Liberating Structures strings with the help of
  Wise Crowds
  or
  Troika Consulting
  and
  15% Solutions
  . 15 min.
  

Below: presentation materials we use to introduce
Integrated~Autonomy

• Develop innovative strategies to move forward.
  
• Avoid wild or “bipolar” swings in policies, programs, or structures.
  
• Identify the complementary-yet-paradoxical pairs that are important and manage the paradoxical decisions productively.
  
• Evaluate decisions by asking, “Are we boosting or attending to both sides?”
  
• Evaluate and launch new strategies
  

• A productive starting question has balance and sparks curiosity or a search for what is working. Avoid making one side of the wicked question bad or less valuable to success such as, “How does our effort to be ONE integrated organization squash local autonomy?” Instead make your question equally appreciative of both sides, “How is it that we are both integrated and autonomous in our current operations?”
  
• Draw on field experience and imagination in asking questions such as, “How can we do more of both?”
  
• The goal is fidelity in a few core global attributes and differentiation in each local setting
  
• Laughter and groans (e.g., arrgh) help to identify progress
  
• You may need to encourage the group to try many experiments simultaneously
  
• There often are no quick fixes and you may need to return to the challenge periodically with additional rounds of
  Integrated~Autonomy
  
• When you start, the creative tension between the central and the local sides is relatively invisible. If the group gets stuck or starts to argue, tell each side to put on the hat of the other side and argue the opposite point of view.
  

• Making progress with
  Integrated~Autonomy
  can shift
  what is possible
  for the whole organization as people start to understand that what helps them succeed in addressing a particular challenge applies across
  the board. Whenever this happens, use
  Min Specs
  to go deeper into must dos and must not dos.
  
• Substitute
  collaboration
  and
  competition
  for integration and autonomy
  

• For hospital-system leaders to develop the contents of new management contracts for small hospitals in the same region
  
• For a group of political leaders trying to formulate what should be legislated at the federal level and what should be decided locally
  
• For infection-control experts trying to create hospital-wide policies that do not inhibit unit-based innovations