The Surprising Power of Liberating Structures: Simple Rules to Unleash A Culture of Innovation (8 page)

In the example illustrated in
Figure 3.5
, the Group IEQ is approximately 2. The curve illustrates the distribution for an organization where only a select group of people have developed a high level of Engagement Expertise, either from natural talent or specialized training. Everybody else is using the Big Five conventional microstructures.

In such an organization, only a small percentage of people have IEQ scores of five or more (in this example, about 10 percent). The vast majority have IEQ scores of less than five (in this example, about 90 percent) and a large proportion have scores between zero and one (in this example, 50 to 60 percent). The resulting IEQ curve is deeply concave, which is typical of an organization where
the majority of people use traditional structures for meetings and for working together.

IEQ of a Group Using Liberating Structures

Since Liberating Structures are easy to learn, it is simple for everybody to quickly boost his or her Engagement Expertise and bring individual IEQs above five. This makes it possible for a group of any size that chooses to use Liberating Structures routinely to flip their IEQ curve from concave to convex. In such an organization, Liberating Structures help everybody—senior leaders, managers, frontline people—to include and engage others effectively.

Figure 3.6
illustrates the IEQ for this kind of organization, where the vast majority have IEQ scores of five or above (in this example, about 88 percent) and only a small percentage have IEQ scores below five (in this example, about 12 percent). The resulting concave curve generates a large area under it and thus a high Group IEQ, in this example an IEQ of approximately eight.

With the information from individual and group IEQs, you know where you stand; you have a clear picture of what needs to be done to transform the way people collaborate, how they learn, and how they discover solutions together. As you implement changes, IEQs give you convenient metrics to track progress and identify where to focus your efforts. If people in your group start using Liberating Structures on a routine basis, you will be surprised how dramatically the group’s IEQ curve will flip. This is one of the reasons why we say Liberating Structures are a disruptive innovation: no one expects such surprising results and impact on what is a massive and widespread challenge.

Liberating Structures And Culture Change

Dr. Michael Gardam is the medical director for infection prevention and control at the University Health Network in Toronto. In 2009, he put together an eighteen-month research project to prevent the spread of superbugs in hospitals. Here is his description of what happened.

“This infection control project demonstrated that fundamental change in habits, values, and beliefs can emerge from including and unleashing everyone. Liberating Structures focused attention on
routine behaviors (e.g., hand washing, cleaning surfaces, transporting patients) and were widely employed in the study hospitals across Canada. Within a few months local solutions generated social proof, more diverse participation, and a virtuous cycle of feedback. The results were so persuasive that the project made it into popular local and national media. As the discoveries spread and generated tangible results, values and beliefs also shifted. Participants in the hospitals broke away from the values and beliefs that were, along with habits, holding them in place.”

Changing culture was not a formal objective of the Canadian infection-control project. Instead, culture changes emerged without anyone “pushing” for them. First, participants decided to change some routine behaviors and habits. Then their successful new routines moved them to reconsider some of their values and beliefs and to adopt new ones. This surprised both the project organizers and participants. In the words of Dr. Gardam: “What took me by surprise was how this project fundamentally changed people’s lives and how they work.”

Why is this a worthwhile observation? Three reasons:

To start with a common language about culture, let’s say that culture shifts as three elements interact and co-evolve (
Figure 3.7
).
³
The first element in that process is the unexamined, taken-for-granted assumptions about how things really work. We’ll label those
“beliefs.”
The second element is the things people say they value or espouse as principles, standards, strategies, goals, and justifications. We’ll call those things
“values.”
Finally, there are the routine behaviors and patterns of interactions that can be observed. For purposes of our discussion here, we’ll call those
“habits.”

Culture manifests itself as the sum total of all the behaviors of everybody in a particular organization or community. In a nutshell, culture is experienced and known by two catchphrases: the way we do things around here and what we expect around here. When an organization’s culture changes, you can often feel it or see it before you have words to describe what is unfolding. People simplify by saying that “life is different” on the unit, in the company, or in the community. If you dig deep enough, you will find changes in behaviors and habits that are shifting in concert with more subtle changes in values and shared beliefs. To describe these changes, we use the words “more” or “less” to qualify terms like bureaucratic, entrepreneurial, risk-averse, proactive, silos, rigid, innovative, dynamic, patriarchal, “yes sir,” “go-go,” customer-focused, and product-focused.

In most organizations, efforts to change the culture are always top-down. They start when a leader—often a new leader—identifies an important problem that falls into the category of culture and makes a decision about the preferred future. This is new thinking, which must then be translated into new strategies, goals, incentives, and justifications for making different decisions. Sometimes this cultural wish leads to a major, abrupt change—a restructuring, for instance—that is intended to force a shift toward the desired new culture. The central assumption in this approach is that this shift in elements that we have labeled values will drive a change in beliefs and habits. The idea is that new thinking drives change. Hence the primary focus is on building a top-down, stage-by-stage logical progression from the current cultural state to the desired one. The approach focuses attention on compelling others to adopt the ideas and strategies and act in accordance to them. Transferring know-how takes the form of training and communications designed to overcome local resistance to change.

Sometimes it works, often it doesn’t, and sometimes it backfires and reinforces the existing culture or pushes culture in the wrong direction.

With Liberating Structures, the focus instead is on changing
habits
, namely on changing and improving routine practices, behaviors, and patterns of interaction. The starting point is the issues or problems that the frontline people know and want to address. Changes are not forced by leaders from above but discovered and cocreated by frontline people with the support and participation of their leaders.

Liberating Structures are designed to help people notice the existing patterns and provide structures for including everyone in discovering more productive practices (habits) and for deciding how to shift from the old to the new. The idea here is that as self-discovered and cocreated changes in habits prove to be successful, they will gradually inspire a rethinking of what makes sense in the category of values, namely principles, strategies, and goals. Successful new habits will influence beliefs about what works and what is possible based on concrete personal and group experience. This is cultural change that grows organically as people convince themselves that those are the changes that they can and want to make based on what they have already been able to achieve with their new habits. That is why we say that it is possible to “influence culture” instead of “change culture” through the use of Liberating Structures; the word “change” implies going from A to B, which suggests that what B is has already been decided.

The difference between the conventional approach and the alternative offered by Liberating Structures is summarized in
Figure 3.8
.

When people first start using Liberating Structures to address a challenge, they soon discover that they have more than the solution to a single problem. At a minimum, they quickly realize that they have found a different way to work and address challenging situations. As they expand their experiments in different directions or across functions, their successes invite them to reflect on and rethink some of their beliefs and values. This is the equivalent of a personal culture change. With that shift, even if only in a few individuals, the group and the organization’s performance begin to transform.