The Surprising Power of Liberating Structures to Unleash Team Potential
Embracing Liberating Structures as a way to quickly foster lively participation
By Nic Easton and Mike Koser
Liberating Structures have impacted our organization. Introducing them into our way of working quickly improved the ways ideas and results are generated without any expensive or lengthy training.
What are Liberating Structures?
These inclusive micro-structures (the ways we organize our interactions) foster spirited and animated participation for any group size, introducing a disruptive innovation to the boring, stagnant, and often not productive classical meetings. They make unstructured or open discussions, status reports, and brainstorms less attractive. Liberating Structures have proven to be effective by allowing individuals and teams to be truly creative and innovative in many different industries including business, healthcare, and education.
Micro-structures help efficiently turn meetings into meaningful outcomes. We want to share a few examples of Liberating Structures we’ve used in interesting and creative ways.
1–2–4-All
The 1–2–4-All structure is a useful, dynamic way to ensure you enable all meeting attendees to be active participants by providing explicit time for each person to contribute to the discussion. It works with groups of any size, and it progressively brings individual thoughts and ideas into a larger group discussion. By creating time for personal reflection, and bubbling that up into progressively larger groups, ideas and action items become clear in an efficient, natural way.
At andculture we’ve used Zoom breakout rooms to facilitate this virtually as we’re all fully remote. One way we’ve applied this structure was during a leadership meeting. We asked all attendees “How can we be innovative more frequently?” Our team size was nine, so we structured it in a 1–3-All. People answered individually in silence. Then they each shared their responses in groups of three to build upon their ideas, and identify themes. Finally the three groups discussed their themes together. Out of it came some amazing ideas that might have otherwise gone unsaid. Give it a try yourself, and get creative with it!
TRIZ
The TRIZ is one of our favorite structures. Last year, back when we were all in the office, we used a TRIZ to kick-start a big, lengthy project into its final phase. This group of 25 consisted of four teams all working together to create a software application in the education space. The team, as most long-term teams do, found that their retrospectives had become stagnant, boring, and were not resulting in meaningful action and experimentation. This limited their ability to improve the way the team worked together.
The TRIZ designs a space that invites creative destruction, by imagining what a team can do to create the worst result possible, in order for them to let go of what they know has been holding them back. The structure is designed to fill that void with innovative ideas and action. In a large group, many can find it challenging to have an equal voice because there’s usually 2–3 people that dominate the conversation. Additionally, even when given the chance, many can be uncomfortable speaking to large groups. The 1–2–4-All, the foundation of the structure, created a level playing field that allowed for everyone to feel heard and valued. Introducing such a radical structure created more positive change, energy, and excitement than anyone could have imagined.
25/10 Crowdsourcing
If you want to get a lot of bold ideas in a short amount of time, then you should seriously consider putting 25/10 Crowdsourcing into practice. Attendees are asked a question and anonymously write an idea that they would want to move forward with if they were 10% bolder. These ideas are passed around while attendees mingle, and each idea is rated 5 times on a scale of 1–5 (5 being the best score). These ideas are then collected and visually ranked for all attendees to see which ideas have the most potential. From here you can engage the group further by combining additional structures (like 1–2–4-All) to turn those ideas into action.
Recently we asked our 30 person engineering team, “If you were asked to build something truly innovative, and you weren’t inhibited by time, money, and knowledge what would you build?”
Since we were fully remote we had to get creative to find ways to recreate the social aspect of the activity. We used Miro to help create a collaborative space for everyone to mingle, and pass and score ideas. The event was somewhat awkward due to technology constraints, but we learned a lot about how this process could be improved the next time. Regardless of those challenges we generated some amazing ideas that we’ve since used to identify potential department goals, and new opportunities for our organization to explore.
Stringing structures together
Like many new things, facilitating Liberating Structures can take some practice, and over time as the facilitator you will not only become more comfortable; you will become more daring. You’ll want to experiment and you’ll find yourself asking “What can’t Liberating Structures be used for?” Additionally you’ll try to start stringing some of the structures together. A couple of months ago a group of leaders at the organization were embarking on a new initiative and I, Nic, had the privilege of facilitating the first conversation. Over the course of 2½ hours, we strung together three structures to lay the foundation of the initiative.
Since we’re all currently working remotely we used a video call via Google Meet and a Miro board to visualize our work. We started with Purpose to Practice to be sure we started the conversation with alignment of and focus on the true purpose of the initiative. We skipped over part 5 of P2P which asks you “What are you going to do and how?” and we jumped next into Critical Uncertainties. Critical Uncertainties asks the group to consider the required strategies in order to operate in a wide range of potential yet unpredictable scenarios. We felt this inspection was necessary before deciding what action was required for the initiative. Last but not least, we moved into What? So What? Now What?. This structure asks the group to reflect back on the conversation thus far and then decide what action made sense to take. This was our way of coming back to and closing the loop on part 5 from P2P that we had initially skipped. All of the action items were prioritized and 3 were chosen to take on first.
In just under 2½ hours the group covered a tremendous amount of ground and were able to accomplish what would have previously taken several days if not weeks.
The Impact
Introducing Liberating Structures into our organization has taught us so much; It’s shown us how to level the playing field to give everyone an equal voice, that meetings don’t have to be boring, and that you don’t need a meeting to schedule another meeting. They’ve taught us that we can get so much more done in a short amount of time than we thought possible. We’re certainly not perfect and being remote has introduced its challenges which is why we believe it’s more important now than ever to be purposeful about how we interact with each other. We’re continuing to inspect and adapt the way we organize and collaborate with each other to produce the best relationships and the best results. So go ahead, give it a shot and try Liberating Structures in your organization! Be sure to reach out and let us know what you find.
andculture is a human-centered design agency committed to designing amazing experiences. We use Liberating Structures often to maximize the value we get out of every interaction. When you partner with us, we’ll help you unleash the power of your business and shape new, exciting, and innovative paths. If you’re hungry for more, let’s connect. We’d love to hear your story.
