Develop And Evolve Sustainable Strategies With Strategy Knotworking

Ideas, inspiration, and examples to use Strategy Knotworking with Liberating Structures

On June 27/28 Denise Fleck, Joanne Wolfert-Drost, Matthieu Tournemire, and I host a public Liberating Structures Immersion Workshop in Amsterdam. As a bonus, we’ll also run a 3-hour Strategy Knotworking workshop the day before. During the workshop, we’ll explore the 6 core questions of Strategy Knotworking to identify creative solutions for a tough challenge. Most likely, something that actually matters to humanity.

In this blog post, I’ll share more details about what Strategy Knotworking actually is, why it matters, and offer inspiration for how to start using it.

The 6 core questions of Strategy Knotworking to identify creative solutions for a tough challenge. You can download this worksheet from our webshop here.

Why Strategy Knotworking?

Strategy Knotworking is a coherent set of Liberating Structures that aims to involve and engage everyone in developing and evolving sustainable strategies. And we need a lot of that right now. When these skills are no longer constrained to the board room, organizations become more antifragile, robust, and able to survive these uncertain times.

Unfortunately, most organizations lack the skills to rapidly respond to sudden change. Adaptation takes a long time. Information about a crisis first has to travel up the organizational hierarchy, to be decided on by the people in the boardroom, only to trickle back down to the people doing the work. Or adaptation first requires the formation of specialized “task forces” or “change initiatives” to analyze, plan and then implement a solution. In the meantime, the world has moved on.

And worse, the skills to rapidly inspect and adapt are never developed throughout the organization. We can do better! But what is the alternative?

Strategy Knotworking!

Strategy Knotworking is an approach for shared sense-making and strategizing. It helps groups of any size build the skills they need to adapt to sudden change. With Strategy Knotworking everyone is involved in making sense of their environment, identifying the most pressing challenges, establishing the baseline starting position, developing promising ideas for dealing with their challenges, and defining the first steps for getting started.

Strategy Knotworking taps into everyone’s experience, intelligence, and creativity while continuously (re)answering six core questions:

1. Purpose: What is the fundamental purpose of our work?
2. Baseline: Where are we starting, honestly?
3. Context: What is happening around us that demands creative change?
4. Challenges: What are the critical uncertainties and paradoxical challenges we must face to make progress?
5. Ambition: Based on what we discovered, what is now made possible?
6. Action & Evaluation: What are our next steps and how will we know we are making progress?

For a detailed description of Strategy Knotworking, read more about it in this paper by Keith McCandless and Johannes Schartau.

When To Use Strategy Knotworking?

In the past years, we’ve used Strategy Knotworking for a wide variety of applications. For example, to kick off or reboot a team, develop product strategies, launch a company-wide change initiative, and support organizations to refine their strategies.

Despite its dramatic consequences, the pandemic is a great example of Strategy Knotworking’s value and strength. It required companies to continuously adapt to the changing circumstances. These changing factors often impacted the wider organization. So, people from all different areas in the organization needed to be involved with sense-making and strategizing. Organizations needed an approach that helped them shape the future while creatively adapting to the moment. This is where Strategy Knotworking comes into play.

Because explaining concepts like Strategy Knotworking quickly becomes abstract, we always like to give practical examples. In this article, we describe in detail how we used it for our own company, to prepare ourselves for the pandemic (with all the limited knowledge we had at that moment in time).

Strategies, experiments, and practices we considered using given the potential scenarios that might unfold. Remember, we wrote this on March 2020.

How To Use Strategy Knotworking?

Please note, that there’s not one approach to using Strategy Knotworking. You can explore the various parts of Strategy Knotworking in one hour, one day, or one week. It totally depends on how deep you want to dig into the questions, how many people you want to involve, and obviously how much time you have available.

In general, our recommendation is the include people from different parts of your organization to explore the questions. This prevents thinking too narrowly and can result in surprising insights. Also, prepare yourself to revisit the outcome continuously. Inspect and adapt based on insights that emerge along the way.

You can use many different Liberating Structures to explore the questions. There’s no fixed connection, the possibilities are endless. To help you get started, we offer three examples of Liberating Structures to use for each of the questions. We’ll explain them in more detail below.

Purpose

What is the fundamental purpose of our work?

• Suggestion #1: ‘Nine Whys’. A purpose is the main reason for working together, it’s the inexhaustible reason for a group to exist. As such it is absolutely fundamental for collaboration, yet usually opaque or forgotten. A clear purpose helps teams align toward a shared goal and as a result, gives meaning to all the others steps of Strategy Knotworking.
• Suggestion #2: ‘TRIZ’. Stop counterproductive activities and behaviors to make space for innovation. That’s the intention of TRIZ. Use it as a creative way to clarify the purpose by flipping the question: “What would be the most unclear, vague, or demotivating purpose statement of our work?”. Have a bit of a laugh, connect it to reality, and optionally, do a full Nine Whys afterward. As such, TRIZ can become a ‘seriously valuable energizer’.
• Suggestion #3: ‘Drawing Together’. Use this structure to reveal insights and paths forward through nonverbal expression. Work together to visualize the ideal path forward by only using the five symbols of Drawing Together. Notice patterns & differences. See if you can turn the various illustrations into a purpose statement. It doesn’t have to be perfect, simply use it as inspiration. Again, if needed, follow up with a ‘Nine Whys’.

Making sense of each other's drawings.

Baseline

Where are we starting, honestly?

• Suggestion #1: ‘What, So What, Now What’. This structure is a great way to answer the question ‘Where are we starting, honestly?’. First, focus on facts and observations. Next, make interpretations and draw conclusions. Finally, identify the next steps. This could be the next step as part of the Strategy Knotworking workshop, or for the road ahead.
• Suggestion #2: ‘Ecocycle Planning’. The purpose of Ecocycle Planning is to analyze the full portfolio of activities and relationships to identify obstacles and opportunities for progress. As such, it can also be used to clarify the baseline. For example, create transparency in the activities you do as a team, the state of the product you’re developing, or the progress of a large change initiative within the organization.
• Suggestion #3: ‘Discovery & Action Dialogue’. Finally, ‘DAD’ is another great structure to set the baseline. It helps groups invent local solutions to the problems they face. Rather than giving up or immediately reaching for “best practices” that worked elsewhere, it helps groups carefully analyze the problem, potential solution, and how everyone can contribute to both. It also builds helpful problem-solving skills in groups by providing them with a useful structure to think about challenges.

‘What, So What, Now What’ takes inspiration from the Ladder of Inference by Chris Argyris, an expert on learning in organizations.

Context

What is happening around us that demands change?

• Suggestion #1: ‘UX Fishbowl’. Invite users, stakeholders, or simply our employees to explore what’s happening within and outside your organization that demands change. Fishbowls consist of an inside circle of people with direct experience with a challenge of interest to those in one or more outer circles. The inside circle shares experiences based on a common challenge while the outer circles listen. In alternating rounds, the outer circles generate questions they’d like to ask the inside circle. By focusing strongly on listening and asking questions about experiences, you can use UX Fishbowls to create an environment where people can learn together.
• Suggestion #2: ‘Celebrity Interview’. This structure helps experts and leaders share their experiences and insights with a group in a profoundly more engaging and interactive way than regular presentations. As part of Strategy Knotworking, use it to invite, for example, the CEO to explain what they see happening around the organization that demands change. Or invite an expert from the field to share their observations.
• Suggestion #3: ‘Conversation Cafe’. This structure encourages people to listen and understand each other’s perspectives on a profound, shared topic or challenge instead of trying to convince or persuade others to see it your way. Sitting in a circle with a simple set of agreements and a talking object, small groups engage in consecutive rounds of dialogue. Conversation Cafe invites people to listen to one another’s thoughts and reflect together on a shared challenge. In the context of Strategy Knotworking, the question itself for this round (What is happening around us that demands change?) could be the starting point for Conversation Cafe.

A UX Fishbowl in full swing.

Challenges

What are the critical uncertainties and paradoxical challenges we must face to make progress?

• Suggestion #1: ‘Wicked Questions’. The purpose of Wicked Questions is not to find a single answer but to create transparency about seemingly paradoxical realities that exist side-by-side. By accepting both realities, you can engage in deeper strategic thinking and explore new possibilities. As such, it’s a perfect fit to explore this question of Strategy Knotworking.
• Suggestion #2: ‘Critical Uncertainties’. Optionally, you can string Wicked Questions with Critical Uncertainties to develop strategies to quickly respond to potential future challenges. It enables groups to quickly test the viability of current strategies and build their capacity to respond quickly to future challenges. By using this structure, more resilience is created: the capacity to actively shape the system and be prepared to respond to change.
• Suggestion #3: ‘Panarchy’. Organizations are complex systems. They are made up of many layers, components, and elements that interact in unexpected and unpredictable ways. This interplay guides and shapes our behavior and what is possible. Systems Thinking offers a perspective on how we can influence complex systems. It invites us to look for patterns in the entire system and identify potential leverage points. Once we find the proper leverage points, even a small push can trigger a big change. Include this structure in your Strategy Knotworking workshop to find these leverage points!

A Panarchy in progress. The three levels are on the floor (individual, team, and organization).

Ambition

Based on what we discovered, what is now made possible?

• Suggestion #1: ‘25/10 Crowd Sourcing’. This structure allows you to rapidly generate and sift through a group’s boldest actionable ideas in less than 30 minutes. Not only is it an innovative way to identify bold, ‘out of the box’-solutions, but it is also appreciated by participants for its highly active nature. Use it to quickly make visible what possibilities the participants see to face the challenges they discussed in the previous step.
• Suggestion #2: ‘Min Specs’. Min Specs offers a nice balance between first exploring the entire field of do’s and must not do’s, and then aggressively narrowing down to what is absolutely essential. Optionally, you can connect Min Specs to 25/10 Crowd Sourcing. The result of 25/10 Crowd Sourcing is a top 10 idea (hence the ’10 part’ in the name). Use Min Specs to turn these ideas into a top 3, and refine these ideas into more actionable next steps.
• Suggestion #3: ‘Integrated~Autonomy’. Integrated~Autonomy exists to help groups move from either/or- to both/and thinking. Most of the challenges we face in the real world don’t have an easy answer. Different solutions can be true or happen at the same time. This makes them Wicked Questions. If you used Wicked Questions as a previous exercise, it might make sense to also use Integrated~Autonomy to explore how to navigate your paradoxical challenge in the most effective way possible.

Action And Evaluation

What are our next steps and how will we know we are making progress?

• Suggestion #1: ‘Ecocycle Planning’. I’ve already recommended using Ecocycle Planning to explore the baseline of your team or organization. Based on where you currently find yourself, you can use Ecocycle Planning to also get into motion. What can we do to move our ideas from ‘Gestation’ to ‘Birth’? How can we remove activities from the ‘Poverty’- and ‘Rigidity Trap’? What would ‘Creative Destruction’ look like?
• Suggestion #2: ‘What I Need From You’. In order to move items to the next phase within your Ecocycle, you probably need help from others. WINFY is ideally suited to clearly express these essential needs. Clearly expressing what we need from others to succeed isn’t something we’re very good at. It's easy to get stuck in vague requests like “We need to communicate openly” or “I need your support”. It's no wonder that the response to these needs is often equally vague, like “I will do my best” or “We’ll see”. Use this structure to remove all vagueness and get full clarity on who will do what AND what ideas won’t be turned into reality.
• Suggestion #3: ‘15% Solutions’. A 15% Solution is any first step or solution that you can do without approval or resources from others and that is entirely within your discretion to act. In short, it is something that you can start right now if you want to. Use this structure during this step of the workshop to identify the next steps. To be clear, you can use 15% Solutions continuously during the workshop, you don’t have to wait until the end. Personally, I’m a fan of using 15% Solutions many times, in rapid 10-minute rounds. This ensure ideas aren’t lost, and a list of next steps is growing continuously, instead of only being defined at the end of the workshop.

Learn More

In this blog post, I explained the concept of Strategy Knotworking, why it matters, and offered specific examples of how to use it. I can’t emphasize enough that there isn’t one way to use Strategy Knotworking. In a way, all 33 official Liberating Structures can be used to explore the 6 parts of Strategy Knotworking. Also, don’t make it a one-time activity. Continuously revisit the questions and update the answers based on emerging insights.

In this article, I shared some ideas to make it more tangible of what a workshop could look like. Give it a try, and experiment with what works best for your situation!

If you’re interested in learning more, check the following articles:

• An in-depth series on Strategy Knotworking by Keith McCandless
• Paper: Liberating Strategy — by Keith McCandless and Johannes Schartau
• Blog post: Strategy Knotworking — Turning Ideas And Ambitions Into Reality

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