The Liberators — Moving Forward in a New and Uncertain World
In the upcoming months, we are hosting a series of virtual workshops (public and in-house) to help your team or organization build the skills to apply Strategy Knotworking. This initiative is a joint effort of Johannes Schartau, Fisher Qua, Anna Jackson, Christiaan Verwijs, and Barry Overeem. Sign up here to stay up-to-date with dates, pricing, and opportunities to attend.
The world is experiencing the biggest crisis in decades. As a result, many of us face fundamental challenges. Organizations wonder how they are going to survive and adapt. Scrum Teams have been completely dismantled or reshuffled because their focus and priorities shifted 180 degrees. Freelancers are suddenly out of work and wondering how to overcome their financial uncertainties.
At the start of this year, very few would have predicted this situation. For months in 2019, organizations worked on crafting their big “2020 Masterplan”. Many hours were put into creating this year's strategy. But it all went to waste. On a daily basis, changes occur that have a lasting impact on organizations, teams, and individuals.
The best way to move forward in this new and uncertain world is to continuously adapt to the changing circumstances. These changing factors often impact the wider organization. Therefore, people from all different areas in the organization needs to be involved with sense-making and strategizing.
What organizations need is an approach that helps shape the future while creatively adapting to the moment. Luckily, such an approach exists! It’s called Strategy Knotworking.
“The best way to move forward in this new and uncertain world is to continuously adapt to the changing circumstances.”
Why we use Strategy Knotworking
It was only four weeks ago that our schedule for 2020 was packed with workshops, events, and classes. With one fell swoop, all that work evaporated. Our expected revenue for the foreseeable future dropped to zero. Although we scheduled new workshops from June onwards, it is completely unclear if they will happen. Such are uncertain times.
Since we started The Liberators, we applied Strategy Knotworking to our own company. It helped us define our purpose, set goals, and determine the next steps.
The purpose of this article is to explain what Strategy Knotworking is and share how we recently used it to inspect & adapt to new circumstances. To increase transparency, we will be fully open about our challenges, questions, and choices. This helps you better understand the concept of Strategy Knotworking and its possibilities.
Hopefully, this inspires you to use Strategy Knotworking yourself, within your organization, team, or even private life.
Strategy Knotworking
“Strategy Knotworking“ is a coherent set of Liberating Structures that aims to involve and engage everyone in developing and evolving sustainable strategies on all levels of an organization. It taps into everyone’s experience, intelligence, and creativity while continuously (re)answering six core questions:
- Purpose: What is the fundamental justification for the existence of our work?
- Context: What is happening around us that demands creative change?
- Challenges: What paradoxical challenges must we face to make progress?
- Baseline: Where are we starting, honestly?
- Ambition: Given our purpose, what seems possible now?
- Action & Evaluation: How are we acting our way toward the future, evaluating what is possible as we go?
For a detailed description of Strategy Knotworking, read more about it in this paper by Keith McCandless and Johannes Schartau.
Purpose: What is the fundamental justification for the existence of our work?
We started our virtual Strategy Knotworking workshop with ‘Nine Whys’ to reassess our purpose: “Unleashing Organizational Superpowers”. We decided not to change it but because our workshops are currently hosted virtually, anyone around the world can join. That’s a great opportunity but might also lead to new challenges we need to take into account.
“Unleashing Organizational Superpowers”
Context: What is happening (around us) that demands creative change?
‘What, So What, Now What’ helped us structure our sense-making of the situation by breaking it down into three steps: “What do we notice?”, “So, what does this mean?”, “Now, what next steps make sense?”
What do we notice?
When following the news, we hear reporters say that this crisis will most likely result in a deep economic recession. Although it’s unclear how the Covid-19 virus will unfold in the upcoming months, it’s already evident that the impact on the economy will be massive. We hear organizations talk about the financial struggles they face. And many freelancers lost their contracts (and income) and need to deal with financial insecurity.
For the coming three months, all our events, workshops, and classes have been canceled. People that already registered for a class, are sometimes not even allowed to join again later this year due to new restrictions on expenses. Luckily, we have sufficient financial buffers to survive the upcoming months without a problem. The only costs we have are our licenses and our own salaries.
Energy-wise, we are doing well. As introverts, we (oddly) appreciate the quiet time and the focus that comes with working from home. We did notice a huge increase in virtual calls, meetups, and workshops. Although we enjoy them, they consume lots of energy as well.
We noticed that many trainers and facilitators are offering virtual workshops, classes, and meetups. The interest seems to be there because our user groups The Liberators Network and the Dutch Liberating Structures User Group almost doubled in size in a few days.
So, what does this mean?
Because of all the space that appeared on our agenda, we’ve got enough time to finish the manuscript for our book, “The Zombie Scrum Survival Guide”. Also, we have time to record podcasts, write blog posts, and create material for our webshop.
Another conclusion is that it’s uncertain how long the Covid-19 virus impacts our business. Generating income through existing means — e.g. the webshop and public workshops & classes — will be difficult. Although we’re financially healthy, what we’re doing now may not help us survive in the long term.
This is an opportunity to serve the global community. We can support this by organizing virtual meetups that help people deal with personal challenges. Our ability to design interactive learning experiences (virtual and otherwise) is an important asset. It’s something we can support both the Scrum.org and Liberating Structures communities with.
Now, what next steps make sense?
Based on the conclusion and interpretations of what we see, hear, and notice, it makes sense to explore how to use our assets — the community, our agility, our capabilities — to generate income through other means. It also makes sense to figure out how we can prevent financial disaster when this crisis takes more than 6 months. And, we need to rethink how our existing products can be used virtually (and if this is what we want).
Given our role as stewards for Scrum.org, it makes sense to work with Scrum.org staff and trainers to explore how to conduct the PSM II class virtually. Also, together with the Liberating Structures pioneers, we can support each other in making the community even stronger and showing its potential.
Challenge: What paradoxical challenges must we face to make progress?
After having clarified the situation we currently find ourselves in with ‘What, So What, Now What’, we used ‘Wicked Questions’ to make the wicked challenges we must face visible.
We started by making a list of everything that is true about achieving our purpose. For example, our current products (games, workshops, classes) are designed for interpersonal interaction. Or, The Liberators Network and Dutch Liberating Structures user groups went global. And, a lot of our work and content is available for free (e.g. meetups, blog posts, podcasts).
After having created a list with 25+ items, we generated pairs of opposites where (creative) tension exists between the sides, and both sides are positive, worthy goals.
It resulted in the following three Wicked Questions:
How is that we are offering most of our content for free, while also needing to remain profitable in order to survive, simultaneously?
How is that we want to help others work well virtually, while also preferring in-person interactions ourselves, simultaneously?
How is that we aim for a global impact, while working comfortably from home, simultaneously?
Baseline: Where are we starting, honestly?
Once we created transparency around our paradoxical challenges, we used ‘Critical Uncertainties’ to develop strategies, experiments, and practices for possible future scenarios. We started by asking ourselves:
“What is critical and uncertain about achieving our purpose?”
When thinking of how to answer this question, two factors stood out:
- How long this crisis will take
- How much/many people are willing to pay for alternative (virtual) offerings
The duration of the crisis became the x-axis, with 2–3 months as the positive extreme and 12+ months being the negative extreme. The y-axis was used for how much/many people are willing to pay for our services. With enough to build a new financial buffer on one side and no revenue at all on the other side of the scale.
Now that we defined four potential scenarios, we started to think about what might happen in each of them. What behavior might we observe? What is it that would make us draw the conclusion that one of these scenarios has become the reality? The outcome is visualized below.
After having defined the characteristics of the scenarios, it was time to give each scenario a name that captures the essence and by which, from now on, we can easily recognize it. We ended up with:
- “It wasn’t that bad” → the crisis took only 2–3 months and we managed to create a new financial buffer
- “Introvert Heaven” → the crisis took only 2–3 months, and although we didn’t gain any revenue, we did enjoy the quiet time in which we created lots of new content
- “Inspected + Adapted & Survived” → Awesome! Although the crisis took longer than 12 months, we adapted to the changed circumstances and build a new financial buffer!
- “The Recession Terminators” → We’re in very dire straits, as a company, and as a society, as we buckle under a long and tough recession. Although it doesn’t necessarily mean we need to dismantle The Liberators, we are in serious problems and need to make drastic choices.
Next, it was time for the most difficult part of Critical Uncertainties: coming up with strategies, experiments, and practices that help us become successful in each of these scenarios. To give some examples:
- “It wasn’t that bad” → We’re not going to make any radical changes and will focus on generating new content, focus on writing our book, and supporting the community with virtual meetups, workshops, and possibly classes.
- “Introvert Heaven” → Interestingly if in the upcoming no new revenue is generated, we’re not going to use different strategies and change our approach. But only, if we have got the feeling it will not take longer than 2–3 months. If we have the feeling it’s shifting towards 12+ months, our strategy changes.
- “Inspected + Adapted & Survived” → Although we remain focussed on supporting the community with new content (blog posts, videos, podcasts) we might re-orient our business model to benefit from a worldwide market (e.g. by building an app or offering virtual classes). If the crisis takes 12+ months, many organizations will struggle to survive the recession and crisis. We can support organizations with an in-house workshop focused on sense-making and strategizing.
- “The Recession Terminators” → Besides rethinking our business model, this scenario asks for completely different strategies. We might need to generate individual income through other means (taking on different jobs, individually) and keep creating content for The Liberators to stay in the picture.
Ambition: Given our purpose, what seems possible now?
Once we created strategies, experiments, and practices for each scenario, it was time to identify robust and hedging strategies. A robust strategy is one that enables success in multiple scenarios. So investing in these strategies is always a good idea. A hedging strategy is one that only appears in one scenario, but prevents catastrophe should that scenario occur.
Robust strategies for The Liberators
A clear robust strategy is to continue creating high-quality content like podcasts, videos, and blog posts. This increases visibility helps grow the number of Patrons and eventually leads to more participants for our (virtual) workshops. Organizing meetups for The Liberators Network & the Dutch Liberating Structures user group is a robust strategy as well. We can expand our repertoire by offering virtual workshops to support shared sense-making and strategizing (e.g. Strategy Knotworking). In most scenarios these types of workshops a probably considered valuable. Another robust strategy is to work with Scrum.org to help trainers deliver virtual classes and get through this crisis.
Hedging strategies for The Liberators
One of the hedging strategies we need to consider is to cancel high-risk workshops for Q3 and Q4 when the crisis lasts for more than 3 months. Also, in case of a long-lasting recession, we need to generate individual income through other means and keep creating content for The Liberators (to veer back later). Freezing our salaries from The Liberators will be necessary then to avoid bankruptcy. Eventually, in the case of a long-lasting recession and without sources of revenue, we need to completely reorient our business model.
Action & Evaluation: How are we acting our way toward the future, evaluating what is possible as we go?
Currently, we’re in the scenario “Introvert Heaven”. So far, the crisis isn’t taking longer than 2–3 months. We only move to the scenario “It wasn’t that bad” if we find a way to build a new buffer. The longer the crisis lasts, the more we’re moving to the left side of the quadrant. Our big challenge becomes ending up in the scenario “Inspected + Adapted = Survived”! On a weekly basis, we reassess the four scenarios and determine if making changes to our business model is necessary.
Our big challenge becomes ending up in the scenario “Inspected + Adapted = Survived”!
As a final step, we defined our 15% Solutions. This is to ensure the activity of Strategy Knotworking resulted in tangible, actionable next steps. Examples of our 15% Solutions are:
- Share the outcome of Strategy Knotworking in a blog post (done!);
- Schedule a call to gather new ideas for expanding our webshop repertoire;
- On a weekly basis, monitor our metrics to determine the scenario we’re in;
- Check with Scrum.org how much space there is for supporting PSTs and redesigning the PSM II (done!);
- Promote the benefits of becoming a Patron more clearly.
Closing words
Explaining a concept like Strategy Knotworking quickly can become vague, theoretical, and superficial. To show its possibilities and make it more tangible, we described in detail how we have used it as The Liberators. Our intention is to always be fully transparent to the community. That’s easy in good times, but even more important in challenging times like this.
So how are we, as human beings, doing?
Sharing the outcome of our Strategy Knotworking workshop is mostly a description of how The Liberators as a company is doing. However, let’s not forget the human perspective…
Barry: personally, I’m doing just fine. My three children, girlfriend, family, and relatives are in good health. It feels almost unreal given what’s going on around us. Fingers crossed it will stay the same. In a period like this, I’m extra grateful to be part of a company of two. I can’t imagine having a better business partner! Also, with Scrum.org and Liberating Structures we’re part of two amazing communities. I feel surrounded by people that are all willing to support each other. Seeing all the creative initiatives that are started spontaneously and often without any financial motivation gives me the feeling the future is bright!
Christiaan: I’m doing good. And I’m at home with Lisanne Lentink. A time like this — horrible as it is — also gives a very clear focus. We’re spending a lot of time on our book, but we’re also working with others in the community to see where we can offer support. Being a company of two is great. Barry and I are making a lot of important decisions, and we’re of one mind there. I’m happy that we made an effort to build buffers — both for The Liberators and ourselves — so that we can weather a storm. I do worry about people and companies that don’t have that luxury or are vulnerable in other ways. In a way, the storm is still coming. What gives me hope is how united people seem to be, how many awesome initiatives are being started, and how people are making an effort to make something out of it.
