The String That Never Happened

Liberating Structures are facilitation techniques 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. If you’d like to experience Liberating Structures first-hand, make sure to join our Immersion Workshop in Amsterdam (December 10 & 11) or one of the other ones taking place in Europe in December.

Yesterday Christiaan Verwijs and I facilitated a workshop at the Kadaster. Our purpose was to show how Liberating Structures (LS) can be used to engage and unleash and have the participants discover what is needed to activate teams.

A clear pattern that has emerged in the dozens of LS workshops we’ve facilitated is that we NEVER EVER use the exact string of LS structures we had in mind.

The picture below was our original idea. Within the 4 hour workshop, we wanted to start with Mad Tea, afterward explain the concept of Liberating Structures and set the stage with TRIZ. Appreciative Interviews & 1–2–4-ALL should be used to refresh positive memories of teamwork and W3 & 15% solutions to define the next steps. The final exercise was going to be Troika Consulting which is about getting help once and giving help twice. This was the original idea…

What really happened is…

• 5 minutes before starting we switched TRIZ with the Liberating Structures explanation
• Within TRIZ we decided to skip the “2” in “1–2–4-ALL”
• After TRIZ we did a full 1–2–4-ALL but changed the invitation
• During a coffee-break, we made W3 the closing exercise
• After the coffee-break, we decided to drop W3
• After doing Troika Consulting we dropped 15% solutions as well

The result: a great workshop that fulfilled its purpose and achieved the desired goals!

“If you don’t change your mind, why have one?” — Edward de Bono

But sometimes I wonder why we just don’t simply predict the ideal string of Liberating Structures upfront… something with complexity, group dynamics, and being demanding facilitators might be related to this… :)

If you’d like to know more about Liberating Structures or experience a large number of them first-hand, make sure to join our Immersion Workshop in Amsterdam (December 10 & 11) or one of the others taking place in Europe in that month.