The Liberators Network — Illustrated

About one year ago, we (Barry Overeem and Christiaan Verwijs) decided to change course with The Liberators. Our new mission became to create products, content, and a community to unleash Scrum teams all over the world. As a consequence, we shifted our focus away from well-paid training and large-scale workshops, and instead invested our time (and money) in building a product we believe has a positive impact on Scrum teams: the Scrum Team Survey. In order to get some income, we developed new products for our webshop and created a Patreon account. People that believe in our mission can become a “patron” of The Liberators and support us with a small monthly financial donation. Although both the webshop and the donations from our patrons aren’t sufficient to cover the costs, it has resulted in many valuable moments, experiences, and learnings. Something we are really grateful for.

When we launched the Patreon community and the Liberators Network with the local user groups, we worked together to define principles we all consider important to live up to. These principles were captured in a detailed Mural workspace, but it’s not something you easily access and share. So we decided to collaborate with our visual illustrator Thea Schukken, and create an illustration that shows the principles of our community, and the activities that take place within the global network and the local user groups. We hope it serves as a reminder for existing members, an introduction to newcomers, and an encouragement for others to join our community as well. And, most importantly, to support us in unleashing teams around the world!

In this blog post, we briefly explain the activities that take place within our community, the content you can expect, and highlight some of the key experiences, findings, and achievements. Sounds interesting? Sign up as a patron, and let’s learn and grow, together!

Read blog posts

Since we started The Liberators almost 4 years ago, we publish a new blog post on our Medium page every Monday. This means we’ve already published about 200 blog posts. Pretty impressive! Nothing wrong with some self-praise :) When checking the stats, the top articles our community valued the most this past year were:

• Examples of real Sprint Goals
• What 4 key changes to the Scrum Guide tell us about Scrum
• Experiments, practices, and strategies for being a remote Scrum Master
• When Scrum doesn’t fit…
• When the Scrum Master as a teacher becomes a preacher

Listen to podcast episodes

Together with the launch of our Patreon community, Christiaan simultaneously started a podcast platform. It has already resulted in about 80 episodes. Some are blog posts read out loud, others are unique conversations with other Scrum practitioners, or experts in a completely different field of work, for example with Daniel Russo in the episode “How to remain productive while working from home in a pandemic?”.

Popular episodes prove to be:

• Scrum: A Framework for Empirical Process Control
• How To Kickstart A Great Scrum Team
• Scrum Mythbusters: You Can’t Do Projects With Scrum
• 10 Powerful Questions to Create Better Sprint Goals
• Scrum Mythbusters: The Scrum Master Can’t Remove People From The Team

Host your own meetup

Patrons that signed up as a “Liberator”, which is one of the three tiers of our Patreon platform, have the opportunity to host their own meetups The Liberators Network. An example is a meetup hosted by Oleg Smirsky and Erika Dobesova. They wanted to use the Liberating Structure “Wise Crowds” to discuss how the performance of team members can be measured. How to measure this in such a way it promotes collaboration instead of competition? It resulted in a blog post written by Oleg & Erika and a Mural that captures the outcome of the meetup in detail.

Inspire and be inspired

Nothing beats peer-to-peer inspiration. It’s one of the most powerful activities that can take place within a community. Instead of listening to “experts” for inspiration, learn from people that work in similar roles. An example of this is the experience Maryanne Kmit, and her colleagues shared about how to organize a remote event at scale. In a guest post, they shared their findings and learnings on organizing a large virtual event, hoping to inspire others to try it as well. The value of peer-to-peer inspiration is that it allows others to see what’s truly possible. If someone that fulfills the same role can achieve a certain milestone, why shouldn’t you give it a try as well?

Watch our latest videos

Our YouTube channel is packed with a wide variety of videos, such as recordings of our Sprint Review, our Sprint Planning, or impressions of our training and workshops. Recently, we also started recording the experience interviews we host every month. For example, in March we interviewed Roman Pichler, in April Jimmy Janlen, and in June we’ll host a session with Carsten Grønbjerg Lützen. The purpose of these interviews is to offer inspiration as well, but this time from people we think have tremendously valuable experiences we can all benefit from.

Improve your team, continuously

The primary product we currently focus on is the Scrum Team Survey. As Scrum practitioners, we know that continuous improvement starts with transparency. So we developed an assessment to help Scrum users diagnose their team. Our hope for the Scrum Team Survey is to make it an invaluable and trusted part of the “transparency-inspection-adaptation” loop for every Scrum Team on the planet. With the database we’re building, and a scientifically validated model underneath it, we want to offer teams a place where they can reliably diagnose their process, receive evidence-based suggestions, and feel empowered to drive those changes themselves or ask for help where they need it. We consider the community of patrons are most important stakeholders. They’ve provided us with feedback that helped us improve, change, and develop the survey.

Try new exercises

Given our strong focus on the Scrum Team Survey, it’s difficult to also continue to develop new exercises. However, we did manage to create the Zombie Scrum First Aid Kit. It was launched together with the Zombie Scrum Survival Guide and is often ordered as a bundle. We created the first aid kit to help Scrum teams to diagnose and start their recovery from Zombie Scrum. Amongst others, it includes the card decks “Ecocycle Planning for Scrum Teams”, “Powerful Questions”, “15 Solutions”, and a poster to decorate your team room! Since the start of Covid-19, we did create virtual editions of all our products. So, whenever you order a physical card deck, you also receive a free digital download. This allows you to run all our exercises online with your team.

Experiment With 50 Do-It-Yourself Workshops

In order to effectively use Scrum in your team or organization, many things often need to change. This means changes within the team, such as team collaboration, morale, or mindset. Or changes in the environment of the team, for example how collaboration with management occurs, the relationship with the stakeholders, or how the organization is structured. We strongly believe that teams are in the best position to drive that change. With our 50+ tried-and-tested strings and workshops, you can create transparency together, inspect what makes your work difficult and find novel solutions — together! All our designs are based on Liberating Structures so that every voice can be included in the conversation.

Coaching & Mentoring

Although our availability is limited, we offer personal coaching & mentoring for Scrum practitioners and teams as well. This is often connected to the Scrum Team Survey. For example, we help you diagnose the outcome of the survey, facilitate a workshop to inspect together or encourage you to drive adaptation. Ideally, coaching & mentoring is fully covered within our community as a peer-to-peer service. Yet we like to keep a strong connection to what happens in teams that use our products, and personal coaching & mentoring offer us valuable insights. If you’re interested to receive personal guidance: send us a message. We’re always happy to explore the opportunities.

Join Your Local User Group

While The Liberators Network features global meetups, these can only go so far in offering more personal and local support. This is where our local user groups come in. Each user group focuses on a specific area, which currently covers 11 countries and regions. In September 2021, the community will be expanded with about 10 new user groups!

The purpose of the local user groups is to allow people to find support, offer help, and draw inspiration. Together, we can overcome the tough challenges we face when we try to liberate teams and organizations from ineffective, de-humanizing, and traditional ways of working. The Liberators Network and the local user groups allow us all to tap into the potential of the collective brainpower, expertise, and creativity that such a large and diverse network holds. For example, we develop, field test, and report on strings of Liberating Structures (e.g. to overcome Zombie Scrum or navigate conflicts), develop helpful tools for Scrum Teams, and come up with creative ideas and powerful experiments.

Give And Get Help

As we described earlier, we enjoy offering personal coaching & mentoring, but this obviously doesn’t scale. Luckily, this is where the community shows its potential. With 500+ patrons, we’ve got numerous people available willing to support each other with tough challenges. These challenges are shared on our Discord server exclusive for patrons, or during meetups that use Liberating Structures like Troika Consulting, Wise Crowds, or Conversation Cafe. If you’re not familiar with Discord yet: it’s the cool version of Slack :) It’s a place for social talk, we announce new events, and share videos, articles, and other inspiring content. Good to know: the Discord server is available for patrons in the tiers “Contributor” and “Liberator”.

Co-Create New Products

One of the first products we co-created with our community is the updated Scrum Mythbusters card deck. This is an exercise to create transparency around the purpose, the principles, and values of the Scrum framework. With the launch of the new Scrum Guide, we had to change our material as well. Sven de Koning and Peter van der Klis helped us update all the cards and align them with the new guide.

Another example of co-creation is the whitepaper “Scrum — a framework to reduce risk and deliver value sooner”. In this whitepaper, we describe the Scrum framework in our words. It is how we teach it as Professional Scrum Trainers, and how we’ve experienced it as Scrum Masters. We pay particular attention to the purpose of the Scrum framework and how its components work together to make that possible. With the support of our community, the paper got translated into 7 languages: Portuguese (by Vinicius dos Santos), Spanish (by Olga Munoz Ramos, Susana Martin Sanchez) Russian (by Denis Sunny, Katerina Vekova, Andrey Tolmachev, Maria Alexandrovna), German (by Antje Lehmann), Japanese (by Tomoharu Nagasawa), French (by Elsa Iguedtjal), and in Chinese (by Chungan Ke). A perfect example of what a great community can achieve!

Closing

The Liberators Network exists to help you, and others like you, overcome the many hard challenges of unleashing teams with Scrum and Liberating Structures. Our hope is that you find creative support, that you enjoy the satisfaction of helping others, and that you feel part of a larger movement to liberate teams all over the world. Although this sounds great, we can imagine you wonder what this actually means. So in the blog post, we offered examples of activities that take place within our community, the content you can expect, and we highlighted some of the key experiences, findings, and achievements. Sounds interesting? Sign up as a patron, and let’s learn and grow, together!