Running effective meetings with Liberating Structures

Do not read this if you love all meetings you attend

By Natalia Pou & Joan Diaz, Agile Coaches

Have you ever been to a meeting where 80% of the time only 20% of the people were talking? Have you felt disengaged and bored in a meeting? Did you feel your contribution wasn’t listened to or you didn’t have the opportunity to speak? If these things happened to you more than once, continue reading because you’re not alone!

In our day to day meetings, we’re used to all sorts of behaviours that disengage us and we take these behaviours for granted. We’re doing so because we don’t know how harmful they are. In effective meetings, Return on Learning is gaining importance; this metric helps us understand the financial impact of a continuous learning strategy. In this interconnected world, we have to learn as fast as we can if we don’t want to be disrupted by our competition. That’s why now is the time to unlearn some old structures and learn new ones that could help us unleash team wisdom and innovation.

Conventional ways to run meetings are either too inhibiting (presentations, status reports, and managed discussions) or too loose and disorganised (open discussions and brainstorms) to creatively engage people in shaping their future. They frequently generate frustration or exclusion and fail to provide space for good ideas to emerge and germinate. This means that huge amounts of time and money are spent working in a way that doesn’t fit most of the meetings’ contributors.

What are Liberating Structures?

As Adevinta’s Agile Coaches, we’d like to introduce you to an easy way to run dynamic, engaging, effective and efficient meetings through 33-ish microstructures called Liberating Structures. They are simple and easy to learn and are designed to include everyone in shaping the next steps. No lengthy training courses or special talents are required. Mastery is simply a matter of practice. Liberating Structures routinely unleashes a vast reserve of contributions and latent innovations waiting to be discovered. You can use any of these microstructures alone or link a subset of them, build up a string and draw on results in a way that forever shifts the pattern of working together (click here for more examples).

Liberating Structures spark inventiveness by minimally structuring the way we interact while liberating content and subject matter. Very simple constraints unleash creative adaptability, generating better-than-expected results. Individual brilliance and collective wisdom are unbridled.

Can such a dramatic shift really be that simple, engaging, and powerful? We promise it is! Nowadays, we’re rightly concerned about dealing with all kinds of biases while getting into work agreements and working together effectively towards the same goal. If this is your concern, you can reshape your meetings by using some of the Liberating Structures to avoid bias and even unconscious confirmation bias.

Implementing Liberating Structures in Adevinta

At Adevinta, we regularly use Liberating Structures in retrospectives and workshops to improve active listening skills. For one specific retrospective, we decided to use a string of microstructures because the meeting involved more than a team and we thought that these two points were key: create an environment where all voices are heard and unleash the wisdom of the crowd. For this reason, we did a one-hour retrospective where we used a string of three Liberating Structures’ microstructures: W³, 15% solution, and 1–2–4-All.

Here’s some feedback we received:

From Rodrigo Molina (Backend Software Engineer):

• Debating in random teams: I spoke with people I haven’t spoken to before.
• The approach to facts/data helps us understand why something is important and it makes sure individual actions arealigned with the team’s objectives.

From Florian Coste (QA Engineer):

• It’s useful to spend time thinking about what we did well, what didn’t go so well and how we could improve.
• Mixing rooms when brainstorming was great.*

*We created different video conference rooms and split the group into pairs. Each pair had a different virtual room to meet and come back to the main meeting room and then we swapped groups.

Next steps

At Adevinta, we’re still at the beginning of our journey towards having fully inclusive and effective meetings. We’re in the process of extending Liberating Structures to many more departments across the company in order to change some old behaviours and provide a safer environment where our people can be confident in sharing their experiences and speaking up. This is what’s called Psychological Safety: the idea we should all feel included in the session and comfortable asking questions, sharing ideas and raising concerns without the fear of humiliation and judgment.

If you’d like to dive deep into Liberating Structures, design workshops in a secure environment and see how they work in different meetings, check out the app (iPhone, Android) and card deck from Holiston.