Reflect Your Usage Of Liberating Structures With Ecocycle Planning

Use Liberating Structures to improve your usage of Liberating Structures. That makes sense, right? I can also imagine that this sounds vague, abstract, and fluffy. In this blog post, I’ll give you one very specific example. It’s something I started doing when I learned Liberating Structures myself, and it helped me improve my skills in using the various structures.

I’ll describe how to use Ecocycle Planning to make visible how you use Liberating Structures, and how it helps you to decide what to start, stop, or change. In total, this exercise doesn’t have to take more than 30 minutes. I’ve made it a habit to use it every 6 months, and it encourages me to try new structures, rethink existing ones, and sometimes stop using certain structures for a while.

Give it a try yourself, and see what becomes possible!

About Ecocycle Planning

Ecocycle Planning is part of the repertoire of Liberating Structures. Its purpose is to analyze the full 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 personal work or the work you do as a team or organization, and decide what to focus on next. It is based on the life cycle in nature.

Activities can be plotted on an Ecocycle as follows:

• Renewal (or Gestation) represents all the activities that you think would be useful, but that you are not doing at the moment.
• Birth represents the activities that you have just started doing, or that you’ve been investing in. Although they are not fully valuable yet, and probably take effort and discipline to do, they will become increasingly valuable as you keep doing them.
• Maturity represents the activities that are comfortable and valuable to you. It doesn’t take much effort or discipline to do them. It’s become part of your personal rhythm.
• Creative Destruction represents the activities that have either lost their value to you or need to be reinvented in order to become useful again. Perhaps 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/Poverty Trap. Activities that you keep doing, but aren’t really adding any value any longer, 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. There is innovation taking place, as evidenced by activities on the left of the model, and there are activities that are mature, as evidenced by items on the right.
• Activities that are in the Rigidity Trap and Creative Destruction are prime candidates for reinvention or even removal. Start there before adding new activities, as this creates space for something new.

Steps to use Ecocycle Planning

Now that you have some basic knowledge about Ecocycle Planning, let’s see how to use it for personal reflection. In particular, your usage of Liberating Structures itself.

Step 1 — Plot the 33 Liberating Structures

• Draw an Ecocycle on a piece of paper, or create an empty canvas on an online whiteboard like Miro, Mural, or simply Google Slides.
• Generate a numbered list of all the 33 Liberating Structures, or copy all the icons into the online whiteboard.
• Plot the 33 Liberating Structures on the Ecocycle. Renewal: structures you haven’t used yet. Birth: structures you recently started using. Maturity: structures you’re comfortable using and generate value. Creative Destruction: structures you need to rethink/redesign in order to make them valuable again.
• Add structures to the two traps. Liberating Structures you want to use because you see its potential, but somehow never or rarely use are stuck in the Scarcity Trap. Liberating Structures you keep using but the way you use them aren’t really giving you any value is in the Rigidity Trap.
• Be aware that you don’t have to plot all Liberating Structures strictly in one specific phase. A structure can also be on its way to a different phase. For example, somewhere between Birth and Maturity. Or a structure moves from the Rigidity Trap toward Creative Destruction.

Step 2— Include the 5 conventional structures

There are 5 common conventional structures many people, teams, and organizations still use to communicate, make decisions, and come up with ideas. These are the ‘presentation’, ‘managed discussion’, ‘themed brainstorm’, ‘open discussion’, and ‘status reports’. The problem with these conventional structures is they are either too structured or inhibiting, with one person talking while the rest ‘listens’. Or they are too unstructured and loose, with only a handful of people talking while the rest is struggling to keep up.

Furthermore, conventional structures tend to favor people that are more extroverted and can ‘think by talking’, whereas the more introverted people feel left behind because they are still thinking about a previous point. This is a huge problem if you are interested in tapping into the full wisdom, experience, and perspectives of the people in a team or organization to resolve impediments, make decisions, share knowledge, and innovate.

In short, stop using them! But that’s easier said than done. A good first step is to include these 5 conventional structures in your Ecocycle as well. Most likely, these structures become part of your Rigidity Trap. Meaning, structures you find difficult to let go of. Or they’re part of Creative Destruction. For example, you want to change how your organization uses presentations and themed brainstorming sessions.

Step 3— Decide what to start/stop/change

Now that you’ve created an Ecocyle that shows how you use Liberating Structures and the 5 conventional structures, it’s time to put your Ecocycle in motion. Take some time to reflect on your Ecocycle. Good questions to ask yourself are:

What is it that you notice, see, or observe?

What patterns stand out? What seems to be something you need to invest in?

What Liberating Structures do you need to creatively reinvent or expand in order to move forward?

A final step is to identify one or more 15% Solutions. Ask yourself:

“What is my personal 15% Solution to contribute to the improvements I identified? “What is something I can do without permission from others or resources I don’t have access to?”

A good 15% Solution is short & concise, actionable & specific, bold & courageous, and easy to use & try. For example, “I’ll use 1–2–4-ALL as an alternative for the presentation that is scheduled for next week”. Or, “Tomorrow I’ll use Impromptu Networking during our Daily Scrum”.

Some recommendations

• Frequently create a new Ecocycle. Personally, I run this exercise every 6 months. I create a new Ecocycle and compare it with the previous one to see what changed. Be critical. An Ecocycle should be continuously in motion. So if your new Ecocycle is identical to the previous one, this means you’re not innovating.
• You don’t always have to plot all 33 structures. Especially if you create an Ecocycle on paper, it might be a lot of work to plot all the structures. You can make your life easier to work with a subset. Only plot the ones you consider relevant. This could also be a reason to use it online because it’s easier to copy-paste the structures.
• Share your Ecocycle with someone else. It’s a recommendation I often give. Especially because it’s so powerful. It’s easy to get stuck on your own, have blind spots, or identify improvements that are too vague. So, find a Liberating Structures buddy with whom you can share your Ecocycle. Ask for feedback, and make a pledge to revisit the Ecocycle together 6 months from now.

Learn & do more

Here’s some more inspiration on Ecocycle Planning. Blog posts to read, workshops to try, and a card deck to use.

• Read the original blog post on the Liberating Structures website, or the article we wrote on Ecocycle Planning;
• Learn how it helps development teams advance their technical practices;
• Try the do-it-yourself workshop “Identify What To Start, Stop, And Improve In Your Scrum Team With Ecocycle Planning”
• Run the workshop “Use Ecocycle Planning to make the state of your product transparent”
• Use our card deck “Ecocycle Planning for Scrum Teams”

Closing

In this blog post, I described how to use Ecocycle Planning to make visible how you use Liberating Structures, and how it helps you to decide what to start, stop, or change. Hopefully, it encourages you to keep innovating your own usage of Liberating Structures. Let’s see if you can move all 33 structures from ‘renewal’ to ‘maturity’, and try to replace the 5 conventional structures with more powerful Liberating Structures. You can do it!

If you’d like to learn and experience Liberating Structures, we happily welcome you to a Liberating Structures Immersion Workshop in Amsterdam. Or send us a message to explore in-company possibilities.