The Surprising Power of Liberating Structures: Simple Rules to Unleash A Culture of Innovation (7 page)

We would suggest that the so-called nonexperts, the frontline people close to the challenge, are the ones who are most likely to come up with and sustain workable solutions to the customer-service issues.
BUT
, getting there requires tapping the hidden or unexpressed know-how of the frontline workers. This is where Liberating Structures come in.

Customer Service the Self-Discovery Way

With Liberating Structures, the difference is that from the start, frontline people, leaders, and users agree there is a problem with customer service (
Figure 3.3
). Several project leaders from the internal organization are invited to step up. The team’s approach to exploring the challenge of providing great service is
primarily focused on learning from frontline staff and the organization’s customers. They use
DAD, Simple Ethnography, Appreciative Interview
, and
TRIZ
to gradually engage all frontline groups and a variety of customers. These structures engage the people with the best knowledge of the situation in identifying successful behaviors and practices in current use.
Improv Prototyping
sessions are organized to spread learning and improve existing practices. New informal leaders step up as local ownership inspires more people to take action and networks are reinforced with
Social Network Webbing
. Barriers are identified and local managers take the initiative to remove them, calling on more senior leaders only if needed. As progress on addressing the customer-service situation builds, confidence grows to look for bolder ideas through
25/10 Crowd Sourcing
. More innovative approaches emerge and spread within and across units through the strengthened networks. More people are invited to gather information and ideas with
Simple Ethnography
and to spread these with
Users Experience Fishbowls
. Frontline people create metrics to measure their own progress, maintain gains, and continue innovating. Good ideas from the outside seep in without any pressure from above.

The principles openly expressed by the leaders in this case are:
“We don’t know how to solve this problem, but the people closest to the work (including our customers) collectively can do it. They are the ones who know what is happening; they are the ones who need to decide to change; they are the ones that will need to sustain momentum and continue to innovate over time. Our job as leaders is to remove obstacles and create the conditions for self-discovery and cocreation.”

Tapping the Collective Capacity

The strategy of developing homegrown solutions internally, with or without inspiration or support from outside, requires being confident that they will be more successful than conventional approaches. If such confidence were widespread in organizations, internal development would undoubtedly be the more common approach. Clearly that isn’t the case; otherwise, best practices would not be so popular. Why is that so?

Two reasons: one, many leaders, no matter their level, don’t realize how smart their organization as a whole is and can be and, two, they and those below them haven’t learned how to liberate and tap their organization’s collective intelligence and creativity. Why is that so?

An organization’s collective capacity comes in three layers: what the organization knows it knows, what it doesn’t know it knows, and what it has the potential to invent. Only the first layer is visible to leaders and the view is often incomplete. The other two layers are invisible; the knowledge in layer two is there but must be uncovered before its potential contribution can be developed, and layer three doesn’t even exist until successful experiments generate valuable innovations.

Leaders who are confident about practicing self-discovery believe that layers two and three can be exposed to deliver homegrown solutions that will be successful. They also believe that they and others will know how to unlock those layers reliably time after time. They build widespread faith and confidence in the process through repeated successful experiences at many levels. Creating a growing wave of successes is the only way to build a more self-sustaining and resilient organization that doesn’t continuously depend on external experts.

Groups that discover their innate productive capacity and creativity through the power of self-discovery don’t want to return to having external solutions imposed on them. This is their incentive for developing their own ability to facilitate self-discovery and invite experts only as needed. They own the changes they have to make, which is the best preparation for implementation and adaptation. A look at any of the field stories in
Part Three
will show that self-discovery is a common thread in all of them.

Users of Liberating Structures quickly start seeing the drawbacks of conventional microstructures. It becomes difficult to go back once “liberated.” Frontline people are no longer left out of the innovation action. The top no longer decrees solutions to problems. Experts no longer tell people what to do. Resistance to change fades as conversations flourish and trust blossoms.

Measuring Inclusion and Engagement: IE Quotient

According to recent research by Gallup Inc., 70 percent of American workers are not engaged in their work.
²
Of that number, 18 percent are actively resisting what the organization is trying to get done!

These distressing statistics show how big the need is for organizations of all sorts to transform how they engage people across all levels and functions. Gallup’s research shows that engagement drives greater business productivity, lower turnover, and better work quality; other findings from its study show that organizations in the top 10 percent of engagement outperform their peers by 147 percent in earnings per share and have a 90 percent better growth trend than their competition.

Statistics like these explain why achieving high levels of engagement often is a leadership priority. Unfortunately, the vast majority of people at all organizational levels have not developed the expertise to include and engage others effectively. To assess what we are calling Engagement Expertise, we have created two new key performance indicators (KPI):

We call these indicators Inclusion and Engagement Quotients, or IEQs—not IQ or EQ, but IEQ because engagement must be preceded by inclusion. While broad engagement metrics such as Gallup’s are useful in grasping the scope and significance of the problem of disengagement, they are measurements of the outcomes or consequences of the inability to engage people. In contrast, IEQs measure the ability to engage directly and therefore are useful and to the point of what needs to change in order to build the expertise for achieving higher levels of engagement across the board.

Individual IEQ

An individual’s IEQ is the score achieved from answering a simple questionnaire (
Table 3.2
) which can be found on pages
36
and
37
.

The questionnaire can be self-administered, filled in through observations, or done through a 360-degree process. The range of possible scores is from zero to ten. The answers also provide an immediate diagnosis of which practices need to be changed to improve engagement expertise.

Table 3.2

Individual IEQ Questionnaire

This questionnaire can be used by or for anyone who regularly or periodically leads meetings or manages projects. Use the following scale to score points for all questions except for #3 and #4. When the questionnaire is used to assess what someone else does, replace “you” and “your” in all the questions by “he/she” and “his/her.”

Group IEQ

A group IEQ is derived from plotting the cumulative distribution of the individual IEQs of all group members, as illustrated in
Figures 3.4
through 3.6 below. The Group IEQ is obtained by measuring the area under the curve; it can range from zero to ten.
Figure 3.4
illustrates a “perfect” group IEQ: 100 percent of its members have individual scores of ten.

IEQ of a Group Using Conventional Microstructures