Pivoting The Liberators

Since we started The Liberators at the beginning of 2018 we’ve had the opportunity to work with many amazing organizations. Some of the engagements involved guiding Scrum Master journeys at KPN iTV and ANWB and supporting the KNAW in their adoption of Scrum as a framework. Other in-company work we’ve done was facilitating Scrum Master workshops, providing Liberating Structures events, hosting Scrum.org Professional Scrum Master II classes, and facilitating Zombie Scrum workshops. During each of these engagements, we’ve met great people doing invaluable work for organizations that have lots of potentials!

Shifting Our Focus

This mix of in-house and public work has worked well so far. But over time we’ve noticed that we find more enjoyment in bringing together people from many different organizations (‘public work’). This is largely due to our discovery that it is here that we can make the biggest impact on our purpose of building communities and engaging people to drive change themselves. We also feel that there is an unhealthy reliance of organizations on bringing in external ‘experts’ for in-house coaching, training, and consultancy — more about this below. So we’ve decided to pivot with The Liberators and shift our focus towards public work.

“There is an unhealthy reliance of organisations on bringing in external ‘experts’ for in-house coaching, training, and consultancy.”

A Difference Between In-House and Public Work

Although not always, we often notice a couple of things during our in-house work. Groups tend to be more homogenous in their thinking, experience, and background, making it harder to think ‘outside of the box’ (with quotes like “well, that doesn’t work here”, “it might work somewhere else, but our organization is different”).

In our public work, we’ve noticed that people are better able to explore other ideas, radical approaches and novel concepts — something that is vital when dealing with the wicked challenges that modern organizations face. Another pattern is that the majority of people that participate in follow-up Retrospectives and workshops have attended our public classes. Although they’ve already achieved a certain certificate (e.g. PSM-I or PSM-II), they’re still eager to continue their learning journey with us.

We have also noticed that organizations often try to hire us for in-house work so that we can drive their change, reinforcing a persistent belief that successful change requires bringing in external experts, consultants, and coaches to ‘shake loose’ the system. Hiring external coaches and consultants have become a highly overrated habit in order to succeed with Scrum.

“Hiring external coaches and consultants have become a highly overrated habit in order to succeed with Scrum.”

Although in-house work is financially more lucrative, public work provides us with more joy and enables us to have a bigger impact. That is why we decided to shift our focus on growing a strong community by offering mostly public workshops and events. This allows us to work on our purpose of unleashing organizational superpowers, creating space and time in our agenda’s and our heads to work on that purpose with full focus.

In the end, it’s also a question of how what kind of company we want The Liberators to be. From the start, we’ve decided that we didn’t want to become a traditional consultancy agency. Again, this might be financially more lucrative. But being a company with the goal of maximizing the revenue of its consultants by having long-term engagements with clients, doesn’t fit with our beliefs and purpose. Instead of becoming ‘one of those consultancy agencies’, we want to have an impact by growing communities.

Growing Communities

As The Liberators, we want to unleash organizational superpowers by assisting the discovery of local solutions. This is something we want to support and encourage by growing a global community of Scrum Masters, Product Owners, developers, and facilitators. By connecting like-minded people with each other, we aim to spark new ideas, insights, and experiments, that will be put into practice via joint collaboration.

One example of this is the Liberating Structures User Group that we founded in 2018 in The Netherlands. With over 750 members and rhythm of monthly meetups, we offer the opportunity to practice and explore how to use Liberating Structures in engaging and involving everyone in a wide variety of situations. We provide a safe-to-fail environment where you can try out new structures and give and get help.

We’re also going to engage participants in our events, and the people that follow us to participate in this broad community. If you have a passion for unleashing organizational superpowers and seek collaboration with, and inspiration from others on making that happen, then this is the community for you!

The Liberators Network

This network of Liberators will become our global platform for collaboration, with a focus on Scrum, Liberating Structures, and Product Development (but not exclusively). We will invest in creating opportunities for bringing this community together, either during meetups and events or virtually. We intend to act as Scrum Masters by bringing transparency and opportunities for inspection through public events, meetups and the materials we develop together to support this community.

Some of the examples of things we’re planning to do are to bring a large group of people from different organizations together to develop a “learning journey” for Scrum Masters. We are planning to organize a large event for developers and the challenges they face in Agile Software Development. We hope to do the same for Product Owners, for leaders in Agile environments, and for change facilitators. And of course, we will continue to act as stewards for the Professional Scrum Master II-class, creating and sharing materials, writing blog posts, creating videos, and perhaps even publish a book.

Instead of hiring external consultants, coaches and experts to “shake the system”, only to have them leave when they are “done”, we want to provide a more robust community where people can bring and find solutions for the challenges they face by working together with people from all over the world. Our hope is that we will help break the unhealthy habit of making external parties responsible for the success of Scrum (or other methods/frameworks).

So What Does This Mean?

Our pivot means that our main focus shifts to actively seeking out, building, and contributing to public communities of practice. For example, the Liberating Structures user group and The Liberators Network.

Some of the primary services that we’re going to (continue) offering to the global community are:

• Providing public classes like the Scrum.org PSM and PSM II training;
• Organizing Liberating Structures immersion workshops;
• Hosting meetups related to the Liberating Structures and The Liberators Network user groups;
• Being a Scrum.org steward and improving the Professional Scrum Master curriculum in a community-driven manner;
• Sharing our knowledge, insights, and ideas by writing blog posts, creating videos, expanding the Facilitation Toolbox, and distributing material via our webshop.

We will continue doing some in-company work, but only for organizations with purposes, we believe in and/or that are willing to contribute to the wider community as well.

Closing

In this article, we’ve explained the pivot we’re going to make with The Liberators. Our main focus shifts to actively seek out, building, and contributing to public communities of practice. For example, the Liberating Structures user group and The Liberators Network. We will continue doing some in-company work, but only for organizations with a purpose we believe in and who are willing to contribute to the wider community.

Of course, we’re eager to know your opinion about this pivot? It would be great to have you join the Liberating Structures user group and/or The Liberators Network!