Facing your fears with Liberating Structures

Liberating Structures are 33 facilitation techniques that allow you to unleash and involve everyone in a group — from extroverted to introverted and from leaders to followers. In this series of posts, we show how Liberating Structures can be used to spice up your workshops & events. Move away from the stickies and the whiteboards for a moment, and explore these novel facilitation techniques. If you’d like to experience Liberating Structures first-hand, make sure to join the Liberating Structures User Group in the Netherlands.

Because the most recent Liberating Structures User Group meetup took place during Halloween, we decided to organize that Meetup about fear. In this post we share our experiences and the string of structures we used.

Together with a designteam from Schuberg Philis, we(Barry Overeem, Max Brouwer and myself) came up with a string of Liberating Structures to gather insights about what it takes to overcome fear and to experience what fear feels like.

A diverse audience

Our audience for this meetup was very diverse; from people who had only heard about Liberating Structures (but not tried them) to people that have been using and practicing with facilitating using Liberating Structures a lot. We tried to leverage this diversity. It should noted that even the facilitators had little experience with Liberating Structures themselves. Still, they took on the challenge to overcome their fears and step into the spotlight.

The string

We started off with Impromptu Networking to share ideas about what the world or your daily life work/life would look like if everyone was fearless in their conversations and interactions.

Some patterns that emerged were:

• There would be more conversations;
• The conversations would become richer;
• Organizations would be more transparent;
• Problems would emerge faster and therefore could be fixed faster;

We then moved into Appreciative Interviews, looking for the success factors that enable people to overcome fear. Out of 30 success stories we saw these success factors:

• Awareness of the problem;
• Taking some action, making a first step;
• Persevere, even after failing;
• See failing as the first step towards success;
• Small successes lead to confidence;
• Ask for help, people are willing to help you;

After this appreciative perspective we turned everything around with TRIZ. We explored what we could do to make sure that the use of Liberating Structures would become a complete nightmare.

During TRIZ, People came up with ‘horrible’ ideas …

Ideas ranged from ‘only talking about it and not trying it’ to ‘gathering ideas and then do it your own way anyway’. It was fun and functional to see what happened when people had to point out the ideas that were resembling their own behavior now and then. And so functional to think of behavior you want to stop and what you are going to do to stop that counterproductive behavior.

What do you do to overcome fear?

We closed the meetup with Troika Consulting to help each other with real challenges or questions about overcoming a fear. Every time I see and experience the value of people giving and getting help. With Troika Consulting people do this with a ratio of 2:1 so they give help two times and receive help one time.

Conclusion

In conclusion, we found that organizing a meetup around “fear” was an excellent decision. Everyone was able to connect to it, experienced or otherwise.

If you’d like to know more about Liberating Structures or experience a large number of them first-hand, make sure to join our Immersion Workshop in Amsterdam (December 10 & 11) or on May 30 & 31. or one of the others taking place in Europe in December. Or join the Dutch User Group to give and get help from other users.