Can Liberating Structures save us from the next useless meeting?
Hacks/Hackers London community tested a method that promises to help us through the hassle of poor communication
“Are there any questions before we wrap up?” The last slide of the presentation flickers on the screen. Heads raise from behind a wall of laptops lined up around the table. Has anyone actually listened to the speaker? How many meetings have we already been through today? And this is only Monday, for God’s sake.
Every week we spend too much time like this. The meeting is the nightmare we have to live every day we go to work. And they are increasingly present in our daily work. For our January event at Hacks/Hackers London, we organised a workshop to try out Liberating Structures, an alternative to traditional meetings.
What is the problem with meetings?
According to a study published in the MIT Sloan Management Review, over the past 50 years meetings have increased in length and frequency. Some calculate that executives spend an average of 23 hours a week doing meetings, up from about 10 in the 1960s.
The increase is not due to popularity. In a survey mentioned in the Harvard Business Review, 71% of the respondents said meetings are unproductive and inefficient; 64% that meetings come at the expense of deep thinking.
According to a 2018 research by The Economist Intelligence Unit, poor communication is indicated by 44% of respondents as the reason for delay or failure to complete projects.
We all share the struggle but Liberating Structures has come up with a solution.
What is Liberating Structures?
The aim is to aid communication (and, so, collaboration) in work environments. But if you are thinking of something like stand-up meetings, the Silicon Valley’s darling, you are way off base.
Liberating Structures consists of 33 activities that seem like role play games. “The principle behind them is to shift the power dynamics between people,” David Heath tells me, the organiser of Liberating Structures London. At Hacks/Hackers London we tried three of them.
How does Liberating Structure work?
The first one is the Mad Tea Party, in which we form two concentrical circles in the room. The inner circle faces out and the outer circle faces in so that every one of us is face-to-face with a member of the other circle. Each of us has a few minutes to finish a set of open sentences projected on a screen. Every time a facilitator dings (yes, they have a Tibetan bell), we stop talking to listen to our partner and vice versa. It sounds complicated and I haven’t mentioned yet that every now and then we have to take a step right to face someone else and start a new conversation. For me, being pathologically shy, it’s like “the” nightmare.
Ding! — the Tibetan bell marks my turn to speak.
For the first two minutes, I feel like imploding. But the noise — everyone speaks so loud in this room! –, the fact we are all kind of disoriented and the two beers I had before starting, make my nerves relax. I start having genuinely interesting conversations about whatever. It all goes well until I pair with an Italian guy like me — his familiar language breaks the rhythm and brings me back to my usual shyness.
There’s no time to realise it, though — Ding! — the first structure has come to an end and the second is already starting. After sharing our thoughts with perfect strangers, the Spiral Journal is the time to be reflective. We have a piece of paper folded into four parts. At the centre, we draw a tight spiral for a couple of minutes. Then, we have a few minutes to answer four questions about ourselves, each one on a different part of the paper. Still dazed by the exploit of the previous activity, I start writing without thinking too much. I am eager to go back out there and speak to everyone who has a mouth and a pair of ears. Looking back at my piece of paper now, it seems like the two beers had completely taken over me. As I find out later, people around me kind of feel the same — we are all writing but we do not know what is coming next. “I feared they would ask us to share it with someone else but I had written some very personal things in it,” Jekaterina Drozdovica, a journalism student tells me later. A bit of fear makes its way into me — I feel embarrassed by the idea of sharing my weirdness put down for the record on a piece of paper. What will they think of… Ding!
Fortunately, no one is going to ask us to read out loud our Spiral Journal. Co-facilitator Kathleen Bright explained us later that we would never have had to share our journal: the point of the exercise is a quiet reflection, a chance for the mind, concentrated by drawing the spiral, to wander or focus, and see what emerges.
It’s time for our last exercise: we now form groups of three for the Troika Consulting. In each group, one of us plays the role of the client, while the other two are the consultants. Their role is to offer support to solve a problem. Every few minutes, we switch roles to give everyone an equal opportunity to receive and give coaching. We approach this activity with more seriousness but the feeling is that something clicked — we are at ease, confident. It seems like the usual awkwardness of networking events has slipped away. We are not changing each other lives with snap advice but this is not the point. We are giving everyone a chance to speak up and being listened. “It was the most useful part in terms of peer-to-peer support. I met some people I felt I could genuinely help,” David Rose, a freelance journalist and PR consultant, told me.
The session is over and I feel restless for the next few hours. The morning after I find online a tweet by Conrad Quilty-Harper, digital editor of The New Scientist, who says he is “still buzzing after the thought-provoking” workshop.
But is this something we can actually include in our daily work? “The problem is journalists’ mentality,” David Rose told me. “We are not used to working together and, for this reason, it is hard to bring new ideas in the newsroom.” Which is true and one of the reasons why every office should create new spaces to share ideas.
Another problem flagged is “the pressing deadlines.” I get it, our days are hectic and it is hard to convince our peers to find time to sit around in a circle and listen to each other. Yet, by not taking time to listen, we are missing out a chance to change for the best the way we work. Do we really want to subscribe to the notion that only those who find a way to make themselves heard deserve to be listened to?
Ding!
The Tibetan bell that amused me during the event (so New Age) suddenly reveals its raison d’être. It was there to time our quota and limit the extroverts. It was there to make room for the shy and introvert people and “not to hear only the two confident people in the room,” as Heath told me. Maybe we don’t have time to listen to others because we are too busy listening to the same people over and over again. And someone should ding us to stop.
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