The Surprising Power of Liberating Structures: Simple Rules to Unleash A Culture of Innovation (14 page)

The reasons for including the front line along with leaders is that most organizational issues of any importance involve multiple functions, levels, and disciplines, and the place where things get done is on the front line, not in the management ranks. Putting them in the same room to learn together new methods of working together creates the opportunity to have them discover what they can do together to address their challenges. Learning together is a powerful way to discover how Liberating Structures generate better-than-expected outcomes. Including multiple layers and diverse functions in the workshop experience also promotes the communities of practice that can launch Liberating Structures quickly throughout the organization or community. Confidence builds when everyone starts on an equal footing and there is no waiting for permission.

It’s a liberating experience for an organization’s leaders to be part of an Immersion Workshop: they discover that they don’t have to be in control. As frontline people find their voice and become more and more assertive about participating and contributing in the workshop activities, leaders become less and less concerned about being in charge. It’s as energizing for the organization’s front line as it is for management to experience together and in the moment how leadership and letting go can be compatible and complementary.

What Leaders Should Expect

Leaders who sponsor and participate in the first Immersion Workshop in their organization can expect a surprising, unnerving, exhilarating, or reassuring experience—or all of the above. A large workshop is likely to be the first time that so many layers and functions are gathered in the same space to work together in a variety of configurations on resolving issues, and so the discovery of what is possible is likely to be a surprising experience. Letting go of control, as Liberating Structures require, can be unnerving at first. Fortunately, benefits become quickly visible, providing reassuring evidence that letting go of control can be a responsible choice. As more and more participants gain confidence and contribute, the shared experiences can be exhilarating: Wow! An Immersion Workshop is particularly attractive for leaders who are frustrated with traditional approaches and are looking for innovation; it is rewarding and reassuring to experience the concrete outcomes from the wide range of activities that include and engage everyone in the workshop.

Key Elements of an Immersion Workshop

Since 2004, Immersion Workshops have been conducted in some twenty different countries across Latin America, Europe, Canada, and the United States. Organizational settings have included multinational business, hospitals, government, schools, and nonprofit organizations. It’s remarkable that similar impacts have been achieved in all those spheres, around the world, regardless of cultural differences.

A three-day Immersion Workshop may feature the themes and methods shown in
Figure 5.4
. Each session is designed to address customized organizational needs, specific innovation opportunities, and shared challenges. After the workshop, one-on-one consulting sessions are the most effective way to translate into immediate action what has been experienced during the workshop.

Immersion Workshops are designed to introduce participants to a large number of Liberating Structures very rapidly—it’s a fast “do one, do another one” method of learning. The idea is to create awareness of the range of possibilities that Liberating Structures open up. Also, covering a wide variety of structures underscores the notion that there is no single way to address any particular challenge. Another message that Immersion Workshop participants get loud and clear: you learn by doing; once you’ve seen a Liberating Structure in action and practiced doing it in the workshop, you can do it back home.

An Immersion Workshop treats each Liberating Structure separately. A design team from the organization helps to identify current issues and problems that matter to participants and designs workshop experiences to address those real-life challenges. By covering so many so fast, the workshop demonstrates that the Liberating Structures playbook has something for everybody and everything. Every participant learns that there are several Liberating Structures from which to choose to deal with most situations. In our experience, different people, for whatever reason, are attracted to different Liberating Structures. An Immersion Workshop virtually guarantees participants will experience at least one structure that they like and that will be appropriate for their challenges.

Shorter Immersion Workshops

Since it is obviously not always possible to organize a three-day-long workshop, series of short workshops are effective alternatives as long as the following objectives guide their design:

As a rough guideline, three-hour workshops can include four to five Liberating Structures and whole-day workshops twice that many. Inside an organization, experienced users can also arrange series of miniworkshops that cover only one Liberating Structure at a time and where participants can also share their experiences. Agendas, presentation materials, and notes on process and outcomes from some of our public workshops are available on our website
http://www.liberatingstructures.com/news-and-events/
.

Liberating Structures Coaching

The purpose of coaching sessions is to make it easy for participants to take their first steps toward having Liberating Structures be an everyday practice. Participants sign up for one-hour sessions to work on some challenging problem or goal alone or with colleagues. The objective is to design a sequence of Liberating Structures that will help them address their challenge. A typical session would begin with a series of questions to clarify the issue or bring to the surface the deeper problem. It would continue with more questions about who
needs to be involved, what is the common purpose, what resources or restrictions exist, what end result is hoped for, and so on. Along the way, possible steps are identified as well as the Liberating Structures that could be used to support each of those steps. Participants are encouraged to come up with their own ideas and preferences about which Liberating Structures to use. The session ends with at least one concrete design that participants can start implementing immediately. The strings that are described in the next
chapter
are examples that illustrate the kind of designs that may emerge from a coaching session.

People walk out of a coaching session knowing what they can do, if they want to, to achieve the outcomes they want. They are quite clear on what to do and what to expect when they “bring it all back home.” The next step is to fly solo or to work with some partners in order to apply the same process to another challenge, and another, and another.

Chapter 6

From First Steps To Strings

Learning to use Liberating Structures is like learning a new language. First you learn individual words. Then you put them together into a simple sentence and soon you are speaking series of sentences in the new language.

In the Liberating Structures Menu in
Chapter 5
, each structure is described by a single sentence, there to help you decide when to use it. When one Liberating Structure is sufficient for handling a small routine situation, that single sentence will capture and communicate the essence of what will happen. As you progress from simple applications to attacking more sizeable projects or more ambitious goals that require more steps, you will need to connect several sentences to describe and think through what will happen. In other words, you will need not one or two Liberating Structures but a sequence of them. We call these sequences
strings
. Constructing strings that are adapted to your challenges and have a powerful impact is your second step in mastering the language of Liberating Structures. Making strings is serious fun and invariably stimulates a group to discover innovative ways to solve problems or exploit opportunities. To facilitate this task, we have created a set of Liberating Structures Design Cards that make it easy to quickly come up with many combinations. Or you can simply use the Liberating Structures Menu for inspiration on which structures to include in your strings.

Composing strings is particularly useful when done with a partner or in a group/design team. This approach is always a rewarding investment since it automatically clarifies the true nature of your challenge and what steps are required to address it properly. With
1-2-4-All
, it is quite easy to engage a
large group in generating many alternative strings simultaneously and then selecting the most attractive one. Including others in composing and selecting strings not only gets everybody on the same page, it dramatically improves the group’s capacity to improvise and adapt quickly.

This chapter offers advice about composing strings and provides a number of examples. We like to call this activity
composing
because its purpose is to create an interdependent whole greater than the mere sum of a few Liberating Structures. The goal always is to create results that are much better than could be expected from conventional structures and to build capacity for rapid adaptations.

Matching A Challenge with Specific Liberating Structures

Identifying which Liberating Structures can be useful for addressing a challenge can’t begin without a fair amount of clarity about the nature of the challenge and the deeper purpose of what needs to be accomplished. Therefore, composing always starts with a series of questions such as, “What are we trying to accomplish? Why is that important? Why? Why? Why? Is the true purpose and deepest need for our work clear? Who is going to be affected? Is the purpose unambiguous and common to all concerned?; if not, what are we going to do? For whom is it particularly important? Who else could contribute? Are some people ahead of the game? When this work is done, what will be different? What connections up, down, and out across what boundaries could make a difference? What are the main obstacles? How would such a challenge normally be handled? What conventional approaches would be used? What first step(s) make the most sense? Then what are logical second and third steps?”