Liberating Structures Through the Lens of Complexity

Even before I discovered Liberating Structures, I was intrigued by complexity science. Partly because complexity also plays an important role in a field I was deeply involved in at the time: Agile & Scrum.
 
When I discovered Liberating Structures, I was fascinated by its connections to complexity science. By using LS, I could see those connections in practice, more clearly in some structures than in others (e.g., Ecocycle Planning, Wicked Questions, and Critical Uncertainties). But I always struggled to explain the connection clearly. 🤷‍♀️ 
 
This summer, I decided to dig deeper. I re-read the original Liberating Structures book, explored the new LS Fieldbook, and listened to several podcasts. One conversation in particular helped things click: an episode of The Innovation Show with Keith McCandless.

Part 1 — Design Interactions, Let Solutions Emerge

A central idea in complexity is that we can’t predict or design solutions upfront. This raises an interesting question:

“If you can’t design the solution, what can you design?”

In complex situations, we can’t predict the solution upfront or map out the entire path toward it. Too many things influence each other, circumstances keep changing, and each step can create possibilities that simply weren’t visible before. But that doesn’t mean we can’t design anything. We *can* design how people interact, explore, experiment, and discover what works so better solutions can emerge.
 
One concept Keith discusses in the podcast is the “adjacent possible.” From where we are right now, we can only see a limited number of possibilities. Once we take a step, new possibilities can become visible that weren’t available before. I like to think of it as stepping stones. You don’t need to see the entire path across the river. You only need to find a next step worth trying. Once you take it, you find yourself in a new situation, with new possibilities to explore.
 
This is where Liberating Structures come in. They don’t tell people what the next step should be. Instead, they deliberately change how people interact: 
 ✅ who gets to contribute
 ✅ how perspectives are shared
 ✅ how ideas are developed
 ✅ how people decide what’s worth trying next
 
By changing these interaction patterns, new ideas, connections, and possibilities can emerge. People take a step, learn what happens, and discover what becomes possible next.
 
So perhaps that’s the connection I’ve been looking for: 
👉 Don’t try to design the solution; design the interactions that help people discover it.

Part 2: Five Lenses To Understand The Connection

As I mentioned earlier, in complexity you can’t design the solution upfront, but you can design how people interact so better solutions can emerge. That raises another question: what makes Liberating Structures so well suited to complexity? 🤔

I’ve found it helpful to look at LS through five different lenses. These aren’t necessarily the historical or theoretical roots of Liberating Structures. Rather, they’re ideas associated with working in complexity that help me understand why LS seem to fit complex situations so naturally.

Simple rules

Complex systems can produce complex behavior from a few simple rules. Think of a flock of birds: no bird is in charge, yet simple local rules create coordinated movement. Liberating Structures work similarly: a few clear constraints around participation, group configuration, sequence, and timing can create surprisingly rich interactions. 1–2–4-All is a great example.

Distributed intelligence

In complex situations, no single person has the full picture. Useful knowledge, experience, and perspectives are distributed across the people involved. LS are designed to tap into that collective intelligence. Instead of relying on a few experts or the most vocal participants, structures such as 1–2–4-All and Wise Crowds let you draw on what people across the group know and notice.

Self-organization

In complex situations, no single person has the full picture. Useful knowledge, experience, and perspectives are distributed across the people involved. Liberating Structures make it easier to tap into that collective intelligence. Instead of relying on a few experts or the most vocal participants, structures such as 1–2–4-All and Wise Crowds help draw on what people across the group know and notice.

Experimentation

When you can’t reliably predict cause and effect in advance, thinking harder isn’t always enough. You need to try something, observe what happens, learn, and adjust. Structures such as 15% Solutions encourage exactly this: rather than waiting for the perfect answer, identify something you can try now, learn from what happens, and take another step.

Emergence

This may be the idea that connects all the others. Through many local interactions, new patterns, ideas, and possibilities can emerge that nobody designed beforehand. That’s what I experience in many Liberating Structures. You carefully design the interaction, but you don’t know exactly what will come out of it. A conversation can surface an unexpected idea, connection, or next step that nobody brought into the room fully formed.

Seen through these five lenses, the connection between Liberating Structures and complexity becomes much clearer to me. LS provide enough structure to shape how people interact, but enough freedom for something unexpected to emerge. That’s exactly the balance we need when working with complexity.

Part 3: Influence The Culture By Changing The Interactions

So far, I explored how Liberating Structures help us work with complexity by designing interactions rather than solutions and creating conditions for distributed intelligence, self-organization, experimentation, and emergence. There’s another interesting implication of this: what happens when we apply the same thinking to organizational culture?

Culture emerges from everyday interactions

One idea from Keith that stuck with me was the distinction between trying to change culture and influencing culture. Culture isn’t something separate from what people do every day. It emerges from countless recurring interactions: who speaks, who listens, who decides, who takes initiative, how disagreement is handled, and how people respond when something unexpected happens.

Seen through the lens of complexity, culture can therefore be understood as an emergent pattern. Nobody designs all these interactions, yet together they create recognizable patterns of behavior across an organization.

Liberating Structures change those patterns

This is where Liberating Structures become interesting. They intervene at the level of everyday interaction. They don’t prescribe what people should think or how an organization should change. Instead, they change the microstructures through which people interact.

Think of a typical meeting: a presentation puts one person in the lead while everyone else listens, and an open discussion is often dominated by a few voices. Introduce 1–2–4-All, and everyone suddenly has an opportunity to reflect, contribute, and build on others’ ideas. Same people, same challenge, different interaction pattern.

From micro-interactions to larger patterns

One different conversation probably won’t change a culture. But imagine these different interaction patterns becoming part of everyday organizational life. More people contribute, and different voices influence decisions. Initiative becomes more distributed, and people become accustomed to exploring differences rather than resolving them immediately.

Over time, repeated changes at this micro-level can begin to influence the larger patterns we call culture. Rather than trying to change culture directly, change the interactions that continuously shape it.

Part 4 — What This Looks Like in Practice

So far, I’ve explored the connection between Liberating Structures and complexity mostly at a conceptual level. But the connection becomes much clearer when you look at what actually happens when you use them. Different structures create different interaction patterns, but many share the same underlying qualities: they distribute participation, encourage self-organization and experimentation, and create space for unexpected ideas and possibilities to emerge. Let’s look at a few concrete examples.

Nine Whys

Helps people uncover and connect around a deeper purpose. Rather than prescribing exactly what everyone should do, a shared purpose provides direction while leaving room for people to decide locally how best to act. In complexity, this combination of clear direction and freedom to adapt can be more useful than detailed instructions.

1–2–4-ALL

Distributes participation so everyone gets an opportunity to contribute, while ideas develop through interaction and combination. Nobody determines upfront what the group will discover. New ideas and possibilities can emerge from the interaction itself.

Ecocycle Planning

Helps a group see what is growing, stagnating, needs to be let go of, or requires renewed attention. Rather than following one centrally designed change plan, people collectively make sense of what’s happening and identify where movement might be possible.

Wicked Questions

Helps people resist reducing complex tensions to either/or choices. By asking, “How can we be X and Y simultaneously?”, the tension becomes something to work with rather than something that needs to be resolved.

Critical Uncertainties

Acknowledges that the future can’t be predicted. Instead of betting on one forecast, people explore multiple plausible futures and consider how they might respond under different conditions.

What these examples have in common is that they don’t prescribe the right answer. Instead, they create simple structures that help people make sense of complexity together, draw on different perspectives, experiment with possibilities, and adapt as they learn. The structure is designed; the outcome isn’t.

Closing words

And that brings this short series full circle. In complexity, we can’t determine exactly how change will unfold. But we can deliberately shape how people interact and create more opportunities for new ideas, behaviors, and solutions to emerge.

That’s where the power of Liberating Structures lies: not in helping us implement change, but in changing the interaction patterns through which change happens, and culture evolves.

If you’d like to explore this connection further, I encourage you to dive into Liberating Structures yourself, experiment with them, pay attention to how they change interactions, and notice what becomes possible as a result.