The Surprising Power of Liberating Structures: Simple Rules to Unleash A Culture of Innovation (9 page)

Education is a domain where major shifts in strategy are usually controversial, costly and risky. In contrast, focusing on changing habits, improving routine practices, and altering patterns of interaction is inexpensive and low risk since the starting point is the issues or problems that educators know and
want to address. Changes don’t have to be forced from above but can be discovered and cocreated by the participants.

Liberating Education

If you arrive early enough for one of professor Arvind Singhal’s classes you will find the usual room set up: rows of chairs, all facing forward, ready for students to sit facing the professor at the front of the room. However when students start drifting in you will surprised to see that they don’t plop themselves into the chairs and open their laptops as they do in their other classes. Instead, unprompted and before professor Singhal arrives, they start moving the chairs out of their orderly lineup and into one big circular arrangement. Only then do they sit down. When professor Singhal comes in, he too takes a seat in the circle, alongside his students. As the class progresses chairs continue to be moved into other configurations depending on which Liberating Structures are used that particular day.

Professor Singhal has been using Liberating Structures for several years to the delight of his students who look very much forward to participating in his classes. As his story “
Creating More Substance, Ideas, and Connections in the Classroom
” in Part Three attests, there are few places where the dramatic changes possible with Liberating Structures are more quickly evident than in the field of education. “In the past eight years or so, the nature of the student feedback I hear has noticeably changed,” he writes. “Qualitatively, it is deeper, more soulful. I increasingly hear: ‘This class changed my life,’ ‘I learned so much about myself in this class,’ ‘I am sad that this course is ending for I will miss my classmates,’ and so on. And, I have even heard students say: ‘Thank you for teaching me about healthy communities. But thank you also for teaching me how to learn.’”

The idea of using different teaching methods to foster engagement and peer-to-peer learning is obviously not new. Discussion circles and small study groups, for instance, are quite common in some schools. Yet the Big Five microstructures still dominate and constrain education, with the result that engaging all the students during their time in the classroom is a major and often insurmountable challenge. Using Liberating Structures is a simple change of habits for educators at all levels that will improve their performance quickly and easily. These new habits will also transform classroom dynamics and
create the conditions students need to build a supportive community of practice.

Classrooms are privileged spaces. In an ideal world they would be used exclusively for what can be done only when students and teachers are physically together in the same place. In other words, they would be used exclusively for interactions: working together, discussing, collaborating, asking and explaining, and so forth. Thanks to modern technologies, transferring information no longer requires people to be in the same physical space. Teachers can choose to share a portion of their lectures virtually. Reducing lecture time makes space for a whole new range of interactions between students and teachers. The new challenge for teachers is making these interactions productive. Liberating Structures offer them a larger number of options to choose from, to experiment with, and to combine with whatever else becomes available from other sources.

Some educators or entire schools may choose to eliminate classroom lectures completely. Their flipped classrooms will depend even more for their success on how well the hands-on work in the classroom is organized. This will require choosing combinations of microstructures that are well adapted to the subject matter of each class. Online courses face the same challenge. They too will need interactive support structures if they are going to be more than just virtual lectures. With thirty-three different Liberating Structures an infinite number of combinations can be conceived to redesign classroom time and activities.

There is another compelling reason to use Liberating Structures in education: students need to learn how to interact, work, and collaborate effectively with other people well before they enter the world of work. This is a skill so basic and important that there is no reason not to give all students the opportunity to develop their expertise when there exists a set of methods as simple and easy to learn as Liberating Structures.

If schoolteachers and college professors use them routinely in the classroom their students will learn their value from direct experience. With a minimum of effort students will become aware of the importance of microstructures in working with others. With a little more effort they can be given the opportunity to master the use of some of the Liberating Structures before they join the workforce.

The final reason for exposing students to Liberating Structures is that most are likely to start work in a traditional organization. Therefore, for them,
learning about Liberating Structures in school or college will be their only chance to discover methods that can transform their ability to succeed.

One last point: Schools and universities are just like any other organization; they too need innovative methods to address the many difficult issues, big or small, that they face outside the classroom. They need to find new ways to break down silos, overcome bureaucratic obstacles, and foster innovations. These are the never-ending challenges where methods like Liberating Structures can make a dramatic difference. Complex issues such as the problem of dropouts also demand new approaches and greater levels of engagement within the education profession and with the community. Those who use Liberating Structures in their classrooms will eventually experiment outside of them and discover that interactions among faculty, between faculty and administration, across departments, across disciplines, and with the public can also be transformed by using Liberating Structures.

What to Expect

Whether used in health-care or education, business, government, or community organizations, Liberating Structures disrupt conventional patterns in the way groups work together. They change dramatically the way results are generated
without
expensive investments, complicated training, or dramatic shifts in macrostructures. When Liberating Structures are introduced, many of the conventional approaches that people use all the time—PowerPoint presentations, open discussions, managed discussions, status reports, and brainstorms—become even less attractive than they already are or fall totally out of favor. And with that shift, everything changes.

Liberating Structures
are not
best practices imposed on a whole organization. They do not rely on expensive and lengthy efforts to change people’s behaviors. They are instead a set of simple microstructures that can easily and inexpensively replace the conventional ones that are in everyday use. Individuals and groups can choose the Liberating Structures that suit their likes and dislikes then mix and match them flexibly to address their challenges. Liberating Structures are not only for leaders and change experts but for every person in the organization to use.

Caveat: Once Liberating Structures become everyday practice for your group, it’s hard to go back to the way things were. Many of the Big Five conventional approaches will be eliminated from people’s everyday work practices. As
one of our workshop participants put it: “Warning—you may never be able to tolerate another endless conference/meeting again and might feel that everyone is in ‘The Matrix’ except you!”

As with all disruptive innovations, no one expects what will happen
. Shifts in the patterns of interaction make it possible for inclusion, trust, and innovation to come forward. Not everyone will be ready at the same time. However, some people will immediately use the freedom and responsibility unleashed to make small changes that generate breakthrough results. Immense sources of untapped knowledge, capability, and momentum are revealed.
Expect surprise! Expect smiles! Expect enthusiasm! Liberating Structures are fulfilling deep needs for meaningful and rewarding engagement present in all organizations
.

Chapter 4

Liberating Leadership

How leaders can avoid perpetuating the problems they complain about

Leaders don’t purposely set out to demotivate employees or to discourage them from speaking up. They don’t want to discourage cooperation. They don’t want thousands of useless meetings conducted in their organization. Quite the contrary! They live with these frustrations because they see no other choice.

Enter “leadership” in Amazon’s search box and you will get some ninety-two thousand results—and the number keeps climbing. The world is full of “proven” ideas on leadership. So why is it that so many fundamental issues continue to frustrate leaders everywhere?

When we ask leaders what they would like to see change in their organization, they say:

People contribute too little of their true potential, regardless of how many long hours they work
.

We waste enormous amounts of energy because people don’t work well together. They don’t cooperate effectively, and they communicate poorly
.

Internal politics keep people from pulling together with a common purpose
.

Too many good ideas never come to the surface. They stay buried in people’s heads and don’t ever get a chance to come out
.

Managers and their experts often operate in a world apart from the people closest to the problems. They don’t understand one another or work well together. They have lost touch with the needs of clients and with the people they need to solve problems
.

Relationships between people and between functions are strained. Sometimes they don’t exist at all
.

Too many people are doing their jobs on autopilot. They are not enthused about coming to work; they don’t trust the idea of teamwork and are fed up with meetings
.

Inevitable? We think not. But these issues perpetually frustrate leaders, no matter where they are in the organizational hierarchy. Plus, many of the strategies they use to mitigate these “perpetual problems” do nothing to change the situation and sometimes make it even worse.

Around the globe, leaders employ an elaborate and expensive array of countermeasures to address these frustrations. Reward programs, cross-functional incentives, change-management experts, personal coaches, and external consultants are tapped to deliver results such as:

These programs and investments rarely deliver the desired results. While they have merit in some situations, these approaches don’t have much influence on a main cause of the problems: how everyday work is performed. Too often, they make the problems worse and deepen cynicism in all directions.

Does any of this sound familiar in your situation?

The Bad News: Unintended Consequences and Side Effects

In spite of their good ideas or intentions, generations of leaders have been unable to turn their goals for more effective, productive organizations into reality. The bad news is that unmotivated employees, unproductive meetings, uncooperative work groups, and the rest of the problems leaders complain about are inescapable consequences of their leadership practices and of the way most organizations operate.

Here is why it happens.

Regardless of their own philosophy about leadership, people everywhere end up learning and using the same conventional top-down, command-and-control work practices—even leaders who consider themselves to be inclusive and participatory. Why? Because that is all they ever get exposed to. These conventional practices are routinely used in the vast majority of organizations, from first-level supervisor all the way to the top leadership levels. This grants top-down, command-and-control approaches unquestioned validity, and they are solidly embedded through all management layers and functions.

Traditional ways of working together exist to get things done and produce results, the underlying assumption being that they are the ones that will use the minimum amount of resources. Top-down, command-and-control practices are not designed to build trust, motivate employees, prevent silos, or address any of the other aims that elude and frustrate leaders. Instead, unwittingly, these practices combine to create a system that is perfectly designed to generate low trust, feelings of powerlessness, exclusion, frustration, and fear. The only way conventional work practices vary from one organization to the other is the leader’s management style.