Yeah! I’ve Discovered Liberating Structures, Now What?

Chances are, that when you read this blog post, you’ve had a taste of Liberating Structures. Maybe you experienced Liberating Structures during an Immersion Workshop, a public meetup, or a community event. Maybe a colleague tried a structure during a business meeting. Or even better, you joined a birthday party that was designed with Liberating Structures!

It’s great to see how fast Liberating Structures are spreading. So many people have experienced Liberating Structures, are enthusiastic, see the potential, and want to do more with it. So, a logical question many people have is…

“Yeah! I’ve discovered Liberating Structures, now what?”

How can I learn more? Where can I find others? What is a good next step?

It’s a question I often receive. Instead of answering everyone individually, it’s probably time well spent sharing my ideas in a blog post. I’ll limit the number of recommendations to 10. It’s a nice number, and it should be enough to help you make progress on your ambition to use Liberating Structures.

Ready? Let’s get started!

1. Create your own Purpose-to-Practice

The Liberating Structure ‘Purpose-to-Practice’ (P2P) is a great start for every initiative. For example a team kickoff, a new project, or the start of a new user group. The first step of P2P is to define the initiative's purpose. From there, P2P covers other essential elements — principles, participants, structure, and practices — that are designed to help achieve that purpose. You can also use it for individual reflection and to clarify how you’ll start using Liberating Structures. Take 30 minutes of individual reflection and try to complete the following sentences:

• “My purpose for using Liberating Structures is to…”
• “Rules I must follow in order to achieve my purpose…”
• “People I should include in order to achieve my purpose…”
• “A structure (the way you’ll organize your work, private life, etc) I’ll use to achieve my purpose is…”
• “Practices, strategies, and experiments I’ll try in order to achieve my purpose are…”

Ideally, share your answers with someone else and ask for feedback. Save the poster in a place where you can easily revisit it, and make updating your P2P a recurring activity.

2. Use Ecocycle Planning to identify what to start and stop doing

The Liberating Structure Ecocycle Planning is about exploring what it is that you’re keeping in the air (but shouldn’t), and what it is that you aren’t (but should). It helps to bring clarity to your activities as an individual or as a group and helps to identify where your energy and time should go. As such, it is a foundational structure that you can use periodically to reflect on and refine. I use Ecocycle Planning to make my own usage of Liberating Structures transparent. By distributing the 33 Liberating Structures on an Ecocycle, you make visible what structures you could try, stop, or change.

• Gestation: Liberating Structures you haven’t used yet;
• Birth: Liberating Structures you recently started using;
• Maturity: Liberating Structures you’ve used often, and resulted in lots of value;
• Creative Destruction: Liberating Structures you are rethinking, updating, or changing in order to make them valuable again;
• Poverty & Rigidity trap: Some Liberating Structures may get stuck in the Poverty Trap or the Rigidity Trap. The first holds the structures that aren’t getting the energy and time they need to grow into something valuable, while the second holds the structures that are costing us energy and time while their value is diminished or diminished.

So, take a deck of (virtual) Liberating Structures cards and plot them on the Ecocycle. Do it again a couple of weeks later and see what changes. A healthy Ecocycle is continuously in motion. This means you’re innovative and actually using Liberating Structures actively.

For a more detailed explanation, check the blog post “Reflect Your Usage Of Liberating Structures With Ecocycle Planning”.

3. Define personal strategies with Critical Uncertainties

It’s not always easy to make progress with your Ecocycle Planning. It can be challenging to try new Liberating Structures, let go of existing ones, or change how you’ve used them. There can be lots of different reasons that make it challenging for you to effectively use Liberating Structures. Regardless of the reasons, it’s always useful to give the Liberating Structure “Critical Uncertainties” a try. It helps you to develop strategies for dealing with a range of plausible yet unpredictable futures. For example, what knowledge & experience does the group you’re working with have, and how willing are they to try it? Instead of being surprised last-minute, Critical Uncertainties helps you to define strategies upfront.

So, take a piece of paper and draw the following axes:

• X-Axis: Group is willing to try Liberating Structures— Group gives full resistance
• Y-Axis: Group has lots of knowledge about Liberating Structures—Group is totally new to Liberating Structures

By drawing these axes four possible scenarios emerged that you might face when working with groups. For each scenario, you’ll define the behavior (have do you know you’ve ended up in this scenario), give it a name, and identify strategies that will help you succeed. Check this blog post for a more detailed explanation.

4. Identify your Wicked Question

All of us continuously encounter Wicked Questions. We experience them on a yearly, monthly, and even daily basis. But are you aware of this? You might recognize the situation where your organization tries to achieve goals that seem important and valuable, but somehow cause tension, frustration, or lead to heated arguments. Or in your private life, you’ve got all these great ideas, but somehow achieving seemingly complementary goals just doesn’t work out.

If you start using Liberating Structures, you’ll most likely face Wicked Questions as well. For example: “How is it that I want to introduce new Liberating Structures to my team and keep them focused on their current work simultaneously?”. Both sides of the Wicked Question are positive and worth aiming for, but it results in tension when you try to achieve it. It’s good to know that the purpose of Wicked Questions is not to find a single answer but to create transparency about seemingly paradoxical realities that exist side-by-side.

So, when you start using Liberating Structures, take some time to identify your personal Wicked Question. A good follow-up exercise is to try “Integrated~Autonomy”. It won’t give you the ultimate answer to your Wicked Question but can help you to create strategies to respect both sides.

5. Make progress with 15% Solutions

Good intentions don’t always result in tangible actions. While your ambition might be to start using Liberating Structures, it can be challenging to actually make progress. This is why we’ve found 15% Solutions to be very helpful. Gareth Morgan defines these as any first step that you can take without approval or resources from others and that is entirely within your discretion to act. It is something that you can start right now if you want to. It might not be the ultimate solution, but it’s definitely a good first step in the right direction.

A good 15% Solution is short & concise, actionable & specific, bold & courageous, and easy to use & try. For example:

• Tomorrow, I’ll ask one colleague to co-facilitate a workshop with Liberating Structures with me;
• I’ll use 1–2–4-ALL and Impromptu Networking as an alternative for the presentation that is scheduled for next week;
• I’ll make a pledge with my wife/husband to try one Liberating Structure during our next birthday party.

6. Find support, get a buddy

Getting a buddy could have easily been my #1 recommendation. It’s so powerful to have someone with whom you can share your ideas, worries, hopes, lessons learned, and anxieties. Together, you can prepare strings of Liberating Structures for upcoming sessions. You can debrief experiences and share what structures worked well, and what didn’t. Use a buddy to share all the previous steps. For example, create the Purpose-to-Practice together, share your personal Ecocycle Planning, identify strategies with Critical Uncertainties, make Wicked Questions, and challenge each other with 15% Solutions. Even better: co-facilitate together! A Liberating Structures buddy is not only valuable, but it’s also lots of fun!

7. Stop using the conventional structures

The conventional structures we use to communicate, make decisions, and come up with fresh ideas in groups are fundamentally broken. They are either too structured or inhibiting, with one person talking while the rest ‘listens’ — like presentations, status meetings, and managed discussions. Or they are too unstructured and loose, with only a handful of people talking while the rest is struggling to keep up — like brainstorms and open discussions.

Luckily, you’ve experienced an alternative: Liberating Structures! 🥳

Unfortunately, the 5 conventional structures for interaction are still widely used within organizations and communities. On the bright side: this gives you plenty of opportunities to make people aware of an alternative approach. Take a look at your agenda for the upcoming weeks, and mark the meetings & events that most likely will be structured in a conventional way. Make a promise to yourself and maybe your LS buddy to redesign this session with Liberating Structures. Just stop using conventional structures. If you’re not the owner of the session, reach out to that person and ask him/her if they want to try an experiment with Liberating Structures. As such, Liberating Structures are slowly spreading within your environment, and hopefully, a new generation doesn’t even know the conventional structures anymore!

8. Participate in a Liberating Structures Immersion Workshop

Join a Liberating Structures Immersion Workshop, or run a workshop in your own organization or community. The purpose of an immersion workshop is to let people experience Liberating Structures so they can put them into practice in their own work. The intention of the workshop is to ‘immerse’ participants into learning a large repertoire of Liberating Structures without drowning them.

If you already participated in a workshop, join another one with different facilitators. When I first learned about Liberating Structures, I joined several workshops and as such experienced a wide diversity of Liberating Structures. It also helped me expand my network and built relationships with other great users of Liberating Structures.

Check the Liberating Structures website for an overview of all the workshops that are organized around the world. If you want to join our workshop in Amsterdam, here’s where you can find more information.

In this video, people that joined our workshop in Amsterdam share their findings…

9. Join a local user group or community

By now, there are hundreds of local user groups around the world! Users groups focused on specific cities, countries, or areas of work. Some user groups have 1000s of members others are purposefully small. User groups are a great way to learn together. Check this page of the Liberating Structures website for an overview of many user groups.

We also started our own user group. It has grown into a global community that exists to help practitioners of Scrum, other Agile methods, and Liberating Structures find support, offer help, and draw inspiration. Within this community, we encourage peer-to-peer inspiration to overcome the tough challenges we face when we try to liberate teams and organizations from ineffective ways of working. By now, we also have ±25 local user groups that you can join the participate in meetups in your own language and timezone!

10. Be creative, courageous, and ambitious

People interact continuously. In small or large groups, online or offline, during work, or in their private life. So, there’s no shortage of opportunities to use Liberating Structures! It’s up to you to see the potential and to have the creativity, courage, and ambition to try Liberating Structures. This won’t always be easy, you might face some initial resistance, but I’m confident that once people experience Liberating Structures they’ll be hooked as well. And if they don’t like it: no worries, move on to the next opportunity. Don’t try to convince people, focus on the ones that are enthusiastic and willing to experiment. You can do it!

Closing

So, you discovered Liberating Structures and you’re interested to learn more. But how can you learn more about Liberating Structures? Where to start? Where to find other passionate practitioners? What are good first steps? In this blog post, I tried to offer inspiration and help you move in the right direction. It’s a cliche, but everyone’s journey is different. My only recommendation is to make it a fun & valuable journey. There’s no shortage of opportunities to try Liberating Structures: it’s up to you to grab them and make them happen! Go for it, 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.