10+ Ideas To Use Ecocycle Planning

Liberating Structures are a collection of interaction patterns 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 with Scrum.

Ecocycle Planning is about exploring what you’re keeping in the air (but shouldn’t), and what it is that you aren’t (but should). You can do this individually or with a group of people. It’s a great way to re-orient your team towards the work that matters and to creatively change the work that doesn’t. 💥

To help you see its potential, I’ll share 10+ examples of how Christiaan Verwijs and I have used it with teams and organizations. I won’t explain all the steps of this Liberating Structure in detail; that’s already covered in this article. I aim to offer specific examples of what to plot on your Ecocycle.

Ecocycle Planning

Ecocycle Planning is part of the repertoire of Liberating Structures. Its purpose is to analyze the entire portfolio of activities and identify obstacles and opportunities for progress in a non-linear way. That makes it an excellent way to periodically reflect on your work as a team or organization and decide what to focus on next. It is based on nature's life cycle.

Activities can be plotted on an Ecocycle as follows:

• Gestation: something you currently don’t do but might do in the future.
• Birth: something you recently started investing time in. Although it is not fully valuable yet and probably takes effort and discipline, it will become increasingly valuable as you keep doing it.
• Maturity: something that provides you value. It doesn’t take much effort or discipline to do them. It’s become part of your rhythm.
• Creative Destruction represents the activities that have either lost their value to you or need to be reinvented to become useful again. By doing it in a different way or from a different perspective. Or do you want to stop doing them altogether? This is an active phase, meaning that things that are in Creative Destruction are in the process of being changed. If you only talk about changing things, it’s in the Rigidity Trap.

All activities flow through the Ecocycle, but they can also get stuck. Activities that you know are important but are never invested in get stuck in the Scarcity Trap. Activities you keep doing but aren’t adding any value are in the Rigidity Trap. By plotting all your activities across the Ecocycle, you can identify patterns that tell you something about where you are as a team.

Look for the following patterns in particular:

• A healthy Ecocycle is balanced. Innovation occurs, as evidenced by activities on the model's left, and some activities are mature, as evidenced by items on the right.
• Activities in the Rigidity Trap and Creative Destruction are prime candidates for reinvention or removal. Start there before adding new activities, creating space for something new.

1. Team Activities and Events

Plot the activities and events that (Scrum) teams do and discover what they should spend more time on. And most importantly, what to let go of. To help you get started, we created a card deck with Scrum activities you can plot on the Ecocycle. 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”.

2. Relationships, Teams, Communities

List all the people, teams, departments, organizations, and communities. Make visible with whom you should change or stop your relationship and with whom you should start investing time. This can be a powerful & painful exercise. It might mean rethinking existing collaborations, but it’s done to make them valuable again or create space for new collaborations.

3. Liberating Structures Itself

Distribute all the 33 Liberating Structures on the Ecocycle and challenge yourself to move all of them through the cycle's stages! So, you’ll use Liberating Structures to improve your usage. That makes sense, right? First, plot the 33 Liberating Structures. Next, include the five conventional structures. Finally, decide what to start/stop/change.

4. Change Initiatives

Make the state of your Agile transformation, Scrum adoption, or other change initiatives visible with Ecocycle Planning. List all the activities you have already done as part of the change initiative. Next, list all the activities you don’t do now but might do in the future. Distribute everything on the Ecocycle and explore patterns, problems, and opportunities for progress.

5. The State of a Product

Make new and existing ideas for your product transparent, inspect what this means, and identify improvements to boost product development. First, list the existing features of your product and complete the list with potential features you might develop in the future. Next, ask, “What does the placement of the items say about the state of our product? Where do you see connections between the items?” Finally, identify improvements.

6. Metrics

Identify the truly relevant metrics to your success as a team. Decide what metrics you want to start using, stop using, or change how you currently use them. List all the metrics you currently use. Regardless of how satisfied you are with these metrics. In addition, list the metrics you consider using in the future but aren’t using now. Inspect & adapt. If you need inspiration, try the DIY workshop “Identify The Metrics That Are Most Relevant To Your Success”.

7. Your Role

What are you spending a lot of time on that isn’t delivering value? What is the consequence? What activities should you start investing time in? I use this perspective twice per year. It helps me to reflect on how I fulfill my role and decide what to stop/start/change.

8. Product/Project Portfolio

Clean up a Product Backlog or an entire portfolio of products or projects with everyone responsible. List all the projects your team is involved in or is going on in your organization. Add the projects that might start in the future. This perspective limits the work-in-progress or products/projects-in-progress and gives teams more focus.

9. Meetings

Plotting all kinds of meetings people have to attend, weeding out what isn’t helpful, and investing in what is. Create space for more valuable meetings. If your Ecocycle is packed with meetings, you already made it clear that stopping some might be smart.

10. Coaching & Mentoring

Use Ecocycle Planning as a starting point for individual guidance. Ask the coachee to prepare a personal Ecocycle and diagnose the results together.

11. Team Effectiveness

Use the Agile Team Effectiveness model to make the state of Agile or Scrum transparent. We created cards for all 20+ factors. Distribute the factors across the Ecocycle based on how your team feels they’re living up to them. Next, discuss patterns and start the inspection and adaptation. This exercise uses the material from our product kit, “Unleash Agile/Scrum In Your Organization.”

12. Technical Practices

Scrum doesn’t work if teams don’t have access to the technical practices, skills, and technologies they need to deliver high-quality software as often as possible. Teams can use Ecocycle Planning to advance their technical practices. Read this blog post by Christiaan Verwijs to discover how to use this perspective.

13. Definition of Done

Improve and expand your Definition of Done! It’s based on the DIY workshop “Take Your Definition Of Done To The Next Level”. First, ask: “When you think about our Definition of Done, what are all the existing rules it contains? What are the ones that we haven’t included but definitely should to raise the bar?” Next, plot the rules on your Ecocycle based on how you think the teams use it. Ask: “What does the placement of the rules say about how we use the Definition of Done and the quality we deliver? What patterns are emerging?” Finally, decide on how to improve your Definition of Done to improve quality.

14. Release Automation

Use Ecocycle Planning to diagnose your team's release automation level and identify where you can improve. It’s based on this DIY workshop.

First, ask:

“When a scientist would observe the process we all go through for a high-quality release, which steps, activities, and operations would they observe? Make a list of all the meaningful steps that happen, automated or manual.”

Next, plot the activities from the numbered list on your Ecocycle based on how automated you think they are. Ask:

“What does the placement of the activities say about how we’re investing in automation? What patterns are emerging?”

As a final step, ask:

“If we would do this Ecocycle again in a month, what are creative first steps you see now, that would move one or more activities along the Ecocycle by then?”

Close the workshop by identifying a bunch of 15% Solutions.

Closing

As you can see, there are many different ways to use Ecocycle Planning. If you enjoyed using it, then also give Panarchy a try. With Ecocycle Planning you make one part of ‘the system’ visible, Panarchy allows you to analyze ‘the whole system’ and to find opportunities for change. Super powerful! 💪

How have you used Ecocycle Planning? What other opportunities do you see? 🤔