The Surprising Power of Liberating Structures: Simple Rules to Unleash A Culture of Innovation (5 page)

Managed Discussion

The standard way of avoiding a mess is to put somebody in charge. In a Managed Discussion, someone is in charge (leader, chair, professor) and responsible for guiding the discussion. Managed Discussions frequently come after a presentation or a status report. Their purpose can be to come to a conclusion or reach a decision or make some progress.

The structural design of the Managed Discussion is:

The Managed Discussion puts control entirely into a single hand, with all the difficulties and complications that this entails. The most common challenge for the leader (or chair, or professor, or expert) is giving to all participants the time they need for comfortably expressing their views. Making it safe for everybody to speak up is another common challenge since acquiescing is the easiest option. Achieving true depth and quality of content within a predetermined amount of time is often impossible.

Chairing Managed Discussions at senior levels is a special challenge. Even though senior leaders are likely to be more skilled in expressing themselves in group discussions, the issues they address are much more complex and power dynamics tend to be significantly stronger. The boss may want more participation in shaping next steps, but if everyone doesn’t step up, this reinforces the pattern of making decisions at the top. Including participants from lower levels as equal partners in a Managed Discussion with a group of senior people is an art form too often neglected.

From Too Much Or Too Little Control To Well-Structured and Distributed Control

By definition, full engagement means that everybody plays an active and unrestrained role in contributing ideas, discussing options, and shaping next steps. The descriptions of the Presentation, the Open Discussion, and the Managed Discussion make it clear how and why conventional structures fail to make this possible. They provide too much control of content or too little structure to effectively engage more than a few people in shaping next steps. In the next
chapter
, we will describe a Liberating Structure called
1-2-4-All
to exemplify how Liberating Structures make it possible to easily achieve full engagement regardless of group size.

Figure 2.4
provides a visual summary of these differences between Liberating Structures and conventional microstructures. It illustrates that:

Conventional microstructures perpetuate long-running traditions. They are huge time wasters. In many organizations, people, and leaders in particular, spend an enormous amount of time passively listening to PowerPoint presentations. This was unavoidable decades ago but not anymore. Current communication technologies make it possible to share information very effectively without people having to be in the same physical space. This frees up face-to-face time to be used for truly interactive activities designed to generate new ideas or solve problems. To take advantage of this opportunity, a different kind of microstructure is needed that can fully engage participants. Liberating Structures are designed precisely for that purpose.

Chapter 3

Liberating Structures For Everyone

How easy it is for anyone to radically improve the way people work together

Liberating Structures are adaptable microstructures that make it quick and simple for groups of people of any size to radically improve how they interact and work together.
¹
In contrast to the Big Five, Liberating Structures are specifically designed to include, engage, and unleash everyone in contributing ideas and shaping their future. They can be used to complement the Big Five approaches that people use all the time—or simply replace them.

Instead of oscillating between too much control (Presentation), too little control (Open Discussion), and too centralized control (Managed Discussion), Liberating Structures distribute the control of content among all the participants so that they can shape direction together as the action unfolds. This liberates energy, unleashes participants’ contributions, stimulates creativity, and reveals the group’s latent intelligence. Liberating Structures are designed to transform the way people collaborate, how they learn, and how they discover solutions together. They support and spark creative adaptability. A description of a basic Liberating Structure called
1-2-4-All
shows how these features work in practice.

A Liberating Structure in Action

We know that the group is smarter than any single individual. The challenges are: How to tap into a group’s collective intelligence and creativity when discussing an issue? How to prevent a conversation dominated by a couple of people? How to avoid a discussion that goes on, and on, and on?

1-2-4-All
is one of the most effective methods for overcoming those challenges. It is so simple that it can be used anytime, anywhere, by anyone. Learning to use
1-2-4-All
makes it easy to work your way into some of the other Liberating Structures detailed in
Part Four: The Field Guide to Liberating Structures
.

The whole cycle can be as short as three minutes and shouldn’t be longer than fifteen minutes. If an issue warrants more time, it is more productive to do a second cycle. Two cycles of ten minutes are better than one cycle of twenty minutes.

Why the Structure Works

Why does the insertion of a four-step structure elevate discussions consistently to a higher level no matter who the participants are or how senior or sophisticated they are? First, effective use of
1-2-4-All
does not hinge on expertise or talent. All you have to be able to do, we often say, is count to four.

Second, unlike Open or Managed Discussion,
1-2-4-All
gives everyone both more time and equal time to contribute. The structure does this automatically without a “boss” having to give permission to anyone.

Third, it makes space for silent thoughts that otherwise would stay in people’s heads to surface and be written down. Reflection in silence is an extremely valuable but consistently underutilized structural element in meetings

Then, working in pairs provides the safest possible space for everyone to articulate and test thoughts for the first time. It guarantees that everyone will express himself or herself at least a little. Since every voice is heard, the amount and, most importantly, the diversity of ideas are multiplied compared to a Managed or Open Discussion, resulting in much richer initial content.

In the groups of four, ideas—especially controversial ones—get a chance to be discussed and sifted to get them ready to be shared with the whole group. The stepwise progression provides support and time for ideas to be formed, modified, and strengthened before being exposed to a large group.

Finally, in the last step, going quickly from group to group and collecting one main idea at a time levels the playing field to make space for all ideas to be aired.

Overall, the progressive nature of the conversation, as it moves from one to two to four people, provides everyone with the repetition and time for greater depth and meaning to develop.

1-2-4-All
levels the personality playing field, giving safe spaces for the more timid and preventing the more vocal ones from monopolizing the entire
discussion. Many more good ideas are given the chance to get picked up. Without having to jostle for space to be heard, participants are freed to focus on listening. Cocreation rather than advocating for one’s position becomes more possible. As all participants hear the same information at the same time, they can discover patterns together. Better ideas, and more of them, are generated. Open, generative conversations unfold. Ideas are sifted in rapid fashion and “painlessly.” Solutions, conclusions, or decisions are reached more quickly.