Drive Improvement In And Around Your Team With Our Facilitation Kits

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The Liberators

9 min readJun 3, 2024

Our mission at The Liberators is to unleash teams all over the world from outdated, old-fashioned, and ineffective ways of working. We give most of our materials away for free, like our weekly blogs, podcasts, research initiatives, our facilitation posters, and many of our facilitation guides.

We also developed a series of physical kits with powerful exercises to drive change in and around your team. The revenue we generate from selling these kits is used to create more free content. So, in this post, we will offer a quick tour of our best kits and hopefully convince you to get your hands on one or more if you haven’t already done so.

You can also check out our online shop at shop.theliberators.com. We ship across the globe, except to Russia and the United Kingdom (Brexit made exporting to the UK difficult, sorry!).

We love workshops and team sessions with lots of physical materials. We make most of these, such as the card-based exercises and the posters, available in our webshops.

Zombie Scrum Survival Kit

We created the Zombie Scrum Survival Kit to celebrate the launch of our book, the Zombie Scrum Survival Guide, several years ago. The kit is ideal if your team is struggling to improve, and in need of some inspiration.

The kit comes with a ton of materials:

A copy of the Zombie Scrum Survival Guide. In contrast to most books about Scrum and Agile, we tried hard to make this book as practical as possible while also providing strong arguments to improve. The book features over 40+ super-practical experiments to run with your team to improve stakeholder collaboration, release more frequently, expand your autonomy, and improve all the time.
A stack of 50+ Powerful Questions to invite curiosity in your team, to spark conversation, and to challenge unproductive ideas. The questions are organized into categories, such as “Create better Sprint Goals”, “Break down Product Backlog Items”, “Encourage double-loop learning”, and so on.
The Ecocycle Planning for Scrum Teams exercise. It is built on the powerful Liberating Structure Ecocycle Planning. It allows you to engage everyone in and around your team to create transparency around the status of activities that prevent Zombie Scrum. For example: “We celebrate our successes, both large and small”, “We decide what is on the Product Backlog and in what order, without requiring approval from people outside the team” and “We improve our tools and technologies to make it easier to ship faster and safer”.
A deck to capture your team’s 15% Solutions (with explanation cards). Initially coined by the economist Gareth Morgan, 15% Solutions reminds us to start with the things we do control rather than all the things we don’t. The deck provides 50 template cards for your 15% Solutions.
A large Zombie Scrum First Aid Banner to decorate your team room with. This colorful banner is printed on cotton fabric, so it's very durable. It lists the steps to start overcoming Zombie Scrum.
A set of Liberating Structures Visual Design Cards. We love the power of Liberating Structures to break open systems that are stuck. So they’re very useful for teams that are completely stuck in Zombie Scrum and want to get out. The set contains explanations for all 33 Liberating Structures, including nice illustrations created by Linda van Sinten.
A set of Zombie Scrum-themed stickers to decorate your laptop, books, or team room.

The kit comes with facilitation guides for each of the exercises, as well as a digital version. All materials are printed on 100% recycled paper to reduce the impact on the planet. Get the physical kit for 125 euros (ex VAT).

Scrum Team Starter Kit

Another kit we love is the Scrum Team Starter Kit. We designed it with a set of exercises that are ideal when you’re starting a new team (or joining one). We developed the materials in this kit as part of the Professional Scrum Master II Class we designed for Scrum.org, and have extended and updated the cards since to account for changes to the Scrum guide.

It comes with a ton of materials:

The Definition of Done exercise offers a powerful opportunity to talk about what “Done” actually means for your team, and how a Definition of Done that covers everything up to the actual release is your best way to reduce the risks inherent to complex work.
The Scrum Events & Activities exercise gives teams an opportunity to refresh their understanding purpose of the various events in Scrum. It is not a theoretical exercise but rather focused on why you’re doing something like a Sprint Review in the first place.
The Management in Scrum exercise allows teams to uncover how management isn’t left to a single person (manager) in Scrum but rather distributed over the roles of Scrum Master, Product Owner, and team.
The Scrum Mythbusters exercise consists of a pack of 38 common myths and misunderstandings about Scrum. You can use the cards in a variety of ways to playfully explore why certain statements are true and why others aren’t.
A pack of 15 Seconds of Scrum, which is a fun energizer-like exercise that we created to get started with new teams. Each card contains several terms related to Agile and Scrum, and it is up to one participant to explain it without naming the term.
A deck of Liberating Structures Designs Cards (extended edition). We love these “facilitation techniques” to create conversation and to ensure that everyone has the opportunity to have their voice heard. This deck contains explanations for all 33 Liberating Structures and also several structures that are still in development.
Optionally, you can also get four banners on large cotton fabric canvas. This includes a poster of the Scrum Framework, a poster that explains the Why of Scrum / Agile, a worksheet to identify your stakeholders, and an Improvement Canvas.

Unleash Scrum In Your Organization Kit

Our third kit, the Unleash Scrum In Your Organization Kit, is focused on organizations that want to facilitate change across multiple teams. The exercises in this kit are ideal to identify impediments and obstacles that are shared by multiple teams and invite the creative energy to collaboratively overcome them.

It comes with a ton of materials:

The Panarchy exercise is the core of this kit. It allows you to diagnose your development process across several levels: your teams, your stakeholders, and management. The exercise comes with a stack of factors that are important to effective teams (based on research). It also includes a number of Impediment Cards to mark identified impediments visually.
The What I Need From You exercise is an excellent follow-up once you have identified team-spanning impediments. This exercise allows teams, management, and stakeholders to ask each other what it is they need from each other in order to work more effectively. It is a very no-nonsense exercise.
A stack of over 102 Quick Tips, categorized into areas like stakeholder collaboration, team autonomy, continuous improvement, management support, and responsiveness. Each tip offers a super practical and simple way to improve in a particular area.
A block to capture your team’s 15% Solutions. Initially coined by the economist Gareth Morgan, 15% Solutions reminds us to start with the things we do control rather than all the things we don’t. The deck provides 50 template cards for your 15% Solutions.
Two large banners printed on cotton fabric canvas. The first poster offers a nice, visual overview of the core findings from our scientific investigation into what makes Scrum teams effective. The second poster offers an overview of the 20+ factors that determine a Scrum team’s effectiveness from our research.

Liberating Structures Immersion Workshop Kit

We love Liberating Structures Immersion Workshops. They are the best way to experience how powerful Liberating Structures are. Over the years, we’ve developed a set of posters and materials to simplify the materials we need to bring. We’ve now made this available as a facilitation kit. It's a great starting point for your own (internal) Immersion Workshop.

The kit contains:

5 decks of Liberating Structures Designs Cards (extended edition). We love these “facilitation techniques” to create conversation and ensure that everyone can have their voice heard. This deck contains explanations for all 33 Liberating Structures and also several structures that are still in development.
1 deck of Liberating Structures Visual Design Cards. These are larger than the regular design cards and come with a great illustration of the structure. The smaller ones are great for participants, and this deck is great for the facilitators.
5 blocks to capture your team’s 15% Solutions. Initially coined by the economist Gareth Morgan, 15% Solutions reminds us to start with the things we do control rather than all the things we don’t. The deck provides 50 template cards for your 15% Solutions.
4 large durable banners on cotton fabric canvas to illustrate elements of Liberating Structures. This includes the 10 Principles of Liberating Structures, Liberating Structures vs Conventional Structures, The 5 Design Elements of Liberating Structures, and What Makes A Good Invitation.
1 deck of What I Need From You Cards.
We also offer a larger kit that also contains a set of Tingsha Bells, 3 notebooks for participants, and 7 more durable banners for specific Liberating Structures (e.g. Wicked Questions, Ecocycle Planning, Open Space Technology)

The kit comes with a facilitation guide. Get the kit for 200 euros (ex VAT). The durable banners are expensive to produce, so you can download them free from our webshop and print them yourself.

What Is Keeping You?

We love creating kits that actually help teams solve actual problems. Each kit contains exercises and materials to do this with your team and in your organizations. Each exercise guarantees powerful conversations. And you don’t have to spend time preparing the materials yourself. So, give our kits a try!