The Surprising Power of Liberating Structures: Simple Rules to Unleash A Culture of Innovation (25 page)

As a professor, one asks how class participants might prepare themselves to come into a designated interactional space once/twice/thrice a week at an appointed hour, and benefit from the presence, knowledge, and experience of others, including the professor. This mindfulness also influences the design of what the class participants do, individually or in small groups, in between class sessions to widen and deepen their understanding, to engage in actions and reflections, and such.

My professorial role is now one of a Chief Enabler whose responsibility it is to design and enable a process so that all class participants feel invited, engaged, and allowed to contribute as “whole” people. As an enabler, I bear the responsibility (and challenge) to create the safety and supportive conditions for such invitations, engagements, and contributions to potentially occur. Poetic as it sounds, this process of “enabling” can be difficult and challenging, as the control of the classroom space, time, and content is no longer solely with the professor. The professor exercises some degree of control over the process, and can help provide the frame for structuring conversations, but cannot
completely control (or predict) what surfaces from the collective. That means Liberating Structures, necessarily, create the conditions for “surprising” and emergent classroom outcomes—both of a substantive and relational nature. I have seen how, for the most part, these outcomes result in opportunities for deeper, experiential learning for individuals and the collective and deeper friendships and relationships.

With Liberating Structures, a classroom, its participants, and a professor are always a work-in-progress. And that is what learning is all about, no?

Getting Commitment, Ownership, and Follow-Through:
Neil McCarthy

Seattle leadership coach and consultant Neil McCarthy was working with a large multinational business client to shift the patterns of conversation and foster trusting relationships among key leaders. He turned to a couple of Liberating Structures to help the leaders discover for themselves greater clarity of commitment, ownership, and follow-through than anyone thought possible.

Seattle leadership coach and consultant Neil McCarthy uses Liberating Structures to help leaders and their teams discover for themselves how to make the transition to higher levels of performance. “Like volleyball, I focus on being the setter for others to get involved, not on being the one that is always trying to spike the ball by jumping high above your team, solving the problem with individual force and intellectualism,” he says “I try to ‘let go’ so that my clients can practice how to draw out self-discovery and build trust in their teams.”

Including More People in Coordinating Global Operations

Neil was working with an engineering group of forty leaders—including a general manager, a business manager, global support based in India, and five functional groups from technical operations—who needed to plan and coordinate activities for the coming fiscal year. Normally, this would happen in a meeting with just eight members of the senior team and be undertaken with relatively low expectations. Past experience with the traditional meeting format suggested that clarity of commitment, ownership, and follow-through would be sketchy. As Neil jested in his conversation with the group leader, “We will collaborate by listening to PowerPoint presentations for hours followed by a frenzy of action planning in the last thirty minutes of the meeting.”

This time around, Neil proposed using
What I Need From You (WINFY)
and inviting the entire forty-member leadership team into the conversation. The general manager and Neil had already started working on inclusion with the senior team. “It was not that difficult to shape next steps together with a larger group,” said Neil. Neil’s trusting relationship and a positive track record with the GM made the use of
WINFY
possible. Both wanted to create a new conversation and spark creative relationships among the leadership team. Both had let go of wanting to know the specific outcomes
in advance. Using a new structure like
WINFY
would make it possible to extend these changes to the larger group.

Shifting the Pattern to a Straight-Up Conversation

Eight separate functional groups drafted two BIG “what I need from you to succeed” requests to be dealt with in a fishbowl conversation. The group leaders brought the requests to the inner circle of the fishbowl, asking each representative of the other seven functions for what they needed. Meticulous notes were jotted down. The larger group looked on in awe. What everyone was seeing for the first time was people making direct, straight-to-the point requests to one another, leader to leader. During the debrief, one participant said, “I have never seen a conversation like this around here. I saw that just about everyone was on the edge of their seat the entire time.”

The way the leaders paused between hearing a request and responding to it was remarkable. The quality of listening and capturing the essence of each request was a big change. One participant said, “It was clean. No obfuscation. Straight up. Three unequivocal answers and one brush off—y
es, no, I will try
, and
whatever—
stripped away the unessential.”

Another participant said, “Now I know why I never get what I need. The way my leader asked for what our group needs does not translate well among his peers. I am going to have to be very clear about what we ask for and how we ask for it.” “Now I know what is important for next year,” said another.

As part of the
WINFY
debrief, two different leaders in the group said, “I want to do this in my organization.” The general manager decided to use
WINFY
every six months to help his team stay aligned regarding needs.

Why was
WINFY
so productive? Neil says, “We don’t ask directly for what we need. Often, it is a long, drawn-out conversation. We talk about and debate each aspect of the issue so much that the essence of the request gets watered down to the point where it is meaningless and easy to agree just to end the conversation. It is also possible to neglect a request because it is not articulated clearly.” What appears to be a
yes
becomes a
whatever
in practice.

There’s one more payoff, says Neil: “As a facilitator, I use
What I Need From You
because it helps me get out of the middle. I am more able to practice nonattachment to a particular outcome or having my own needs respected. My credibility as a consultant is not linked to a predetermined outcome. Rather, my contribution comes with structuring the conversation and working with what surprises unfold.”

Inspiring Enduring Culture Change While Preventing Hospital Infections:

Michael Gardam

“What took me by surprise was how a project to prevent the spread of superbugs in hospitals fundamentally changed culture and the way people work,” says Dr. Michael Gardam. By the end of the eighteen-month research project he led, people were working more collaboratively, coming forward with new ideas, taking action on their own to start other programs to improve patient care.

Michael Gardam is the medical director for infection prevention and control at the University Health Network in Toronto. In 2009, he put together an eighteen-month research project to prevent the spread of superbugs in hospitals
.

Superbugs are virulent or antibiotic-resistant organisms like MRSA, VRE, and clostridium difficile that cause serious infections and are famous for spreading in hospital settings. Despite sustained attempts to break the chain of transmissions, these infections remain one of health care’s most serious challenges and transmission rates generally are increasing each year.

Michael’s research project to attack the problem involved five hospital sites across Canada. To fund the project, Michael went way out on a limb with the sponsor. He recommended Liberating Structures and another unknown social intervention called Positive Deviance
⁴
to solve the complex infection-control problem.

It looked like an insurmountable problem at the outset. But just three years later, there was solid proof that Michael’s novel approach succeeded. “We have scientific evidence that a social intervention works!” he told us. “Infection rate reductions of 40 to 100 percent across hospital sites get the attention of the medical establishment.” The unanticipated bonus was the culture change in the participant hospitals that quickly spread across their systems.

A Deeper Look into Culture Change with Social Network Analysis and Ethnography

The research team used
Social Network Mapping
to measure how relationships grew over the study period among people in different functions
and units. Before-and-after data revealed that participation in prevention work had increased at all five sites; staff members increased the number and types of hospital staff that they worked with to control infections. Better still, a diverse mix of nonexperts from multiple functions was taking an active role in prevention for the first time. For example, the work of hospital housekeeping staff is critical to protecting patients from superbugs. Yet, before this project, housekeeping had rarely been part of the conversation. Now, housekeepers were being included in the prevention effort.

Clearly, participation was way up, but very little was known about the quality of working relationships that had formed. The researchers were eager to dig into this question more deeply. The research team also wanted to learn if and how
culture
had shifted. In the last months of the project, they conducted
Simple Ethnography
inquiries at each site, focusing on cultural attributes such as visible habits, espoused values, and beliefs (unexamined assumptions). They interviewed people in different functions and levels—from room cleaners to VPs to project coordinators—using an
Appreciative Interview
format. They asked about successful experience in preventing infections and what made the success possible. “Some of the answers moved me,” Michael said. “I am not a super-emotional guy … but I was. It is wonderful to think that a research project could have this type of effect on people.”