Improving Work Culture and Team Dynamics using Liberating Structures

It’s been more than 200 years since the American founding father, Benjamin Franklin, made the famous and now-cliché quip about life’s certainties: “death and taxes.” If he were alive today, there’s a good chance he would add “a general fear and loathing about meetings” to his list.

As a Knowledge and Learning Specialist at Bixal, a large part of my current work revolves around designing and facilitating meetings, and I’m currently embedded in the Bureau for Resilience and Food Security (RFS) at USAID as part of a multi-year, capacity-building initiative called Feed the Future Knowledge, Data, Learning and Training activity (KDLT).

The Bureau has recently undergone a reorganization and is smartly looking for strategic collaboration points within and across its teams. While there are many ways to connect the dots within an organization, from email to shared documents to internal digital platforms, there is no doubt that real-time meetings provide energy and an immediacy that is vital to getting the work done. I was asked to help design and facilitate several retreats to aid this process in the Center for Ag-led Growth and took this as an opportunity to expand my toolkit, where I deployed the concepts of Liberating Structures.

The Concept of Liberating Structures

When I first set out to plan an engaging and productive retreat for a newly formed staff, I did what I often do when looking for creative ideas: Take to Twitter!

In what I now recognize as a fairly auspicious tweet, Maha Bali, of the American University of Cairo, announced an upcoming free workshop on Liberating Structures. It was a delightfully informal introductory session, and after a week of learning about the concept, I was hooked. I was drawn to the simplicity of the robust yet manageable list of 33 core structures for how to lead participatory meetings. I especially appreciated the principles underscoring the structures themselves, notably the first: Include and unleash everyone.

As a practical matter, workplace learning usually sticks best when it connects to an actionable opportunity. My Liberating Structures journey stemmed from a personal need to design and facilitate a staff retreat, among other meetings, that not only would increase personal engagement and satisfaction, but also help my colleagues get the work done. Furthermore, framing my dive into Liberating Structures as a professional learning opportunity was energizing. Each structure I practiced deepened my own expertise while meeting the needs of the staff.

At this point, I needed to figure out which of the 33 structures would be most relevant to our goals. I chose the following three to get started:

• 1–2–4-All: Perhaps the mother of all Liberating Structures, 1–2–4-All features (1) individual reflection and writing, followed by (2) sharing with a partner, and (4) deepening ideas in foursomes, before (All) meeting back as a whole group. Critics may say this is a roundabout way to arrive at the same place. But in practice, this is a powerful structure that supports participant-led co-creation rather than decision-making based on the loudest voices in the (Zoom) room.
• Appreciative Interviews: This structure allows participants to talk about specific approaches that have worked in the past and explore what could be applied in a current context. Appreciative interviews also can be a springboard for identifying common professional connections, which becomes an interpersonal “glue” that helps build rapport across divisions.
• Troika Consulting: The Troika structure unleashes creativity and collaboration. This protocol allows people to share their situation and challenges one at a time, inviting others to give input and solutions. It is fascinating to see how people so readily volunteer to solve other people’s problems, even as they struggle with their own.

Team-building and Productivity

Deploying these structures at the retreat led to increased engagement, curiosity, and interpersonal connection among participants. The structures also helped amplify voices that otherwise would not have been heard through more traditional open structures, creating a more inclusive environment.

What’s especially exciting to me, though, is the prospect of the structures to help build thriving teams. As the authors of The Surprising Power of Liberating Structures suggest, we shouldn’t necessarily focus on transforming culture, but rather hone in on “changing habits — on changing and improving routine practices, behaviors and patterns of interaction.”

While this list of habits might not sound like the most exciting topics to explore with your team, they are arguably the most direct building blocks to team member satisfaction and productivity. I personally believe this is the true power of implementing the structures.

Collaboration and Courageous Curiosity

Collaborating effectively and building relationships on a team can be challenging, even under the best of circumstances, and working in pandemic circumstances is anything but the best of times. Expertise is invaluable, but it doesn’t require an expert to help build the road to better meetings one step at a time.

What it requires are individuals who are interested in change, are a little courageous and a lot curious, and willing to leverage frameworks like Liberating Structures to build new habits with their teams. To quote the German writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe:

“Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it.”

The opportunity to experiment with Liberating Structures was afforded to me, in part, by the adaptive and educational nature of Bixal’s culture. Being able to take these new learnings and directly apply them to my work is evidence of the powerful simplicity of the structures, and makes for an intuitive addition to our existing toolkit to make interactions truly matter.

Think these concepts could work for you and your team? Try it for yourself and let me know how it’s going at michael.weinraub@bixal.com.