IntroductionLofty aims to include and unleash everyone in shaping the future

When you feel included and engaged, do you do a better job?  Do you think teams in which people work well together produce much better results?  Have you noticed the best ideas often come from unexpected sources?  Do you want to work at the top of your intelligence in a group of people and give the same opportunity to others?

If YES, we have found this is the kind of organization and community that people want to be part of. AND, Liberating Structures help make it happen.

So why is it that so many organizations of all stripes are filled with disengaged workers, dysfunctional groups and wasted ideas?

While there will always be some justification for blaming leaders (or professors and administrators in education), the more compelling and useful explanation is not that people involved are bad, stupid or incompetent, but rather that the practices they have all learned are neither adapted to today’s realities nor designed to achieve the ideals listed above.

Unwittingly, the conventional structures used to organize how people routinely work together stifle inclusion and engagement.

Liberating Structures: Simple, Subtle, Powerful from Liberating Structures on Vimeo.

Conventional structures are either too inhibiting (presentations, status reports and managed discussions) or too loose and disorganized (open discussions and brainstorms) to creatively engage people in shaping their own future. They frequently generate feelings of frustration and/or exclusion and fail to provide space for good ideas to emerge and germinate. This means that huge amounts of time and money are spent working the wrong way. More time and money are then spent trying to fix the unintended consequences. 

 

Simple rules liberate contributions from everyoneThis website offers an alternative way to approach and design how people work together. It provides a menu of thirty-three Liberating Structures to replace or complement conventional practices.

Liberating Structures used routinely make it possible to build the kind of organization that everybody wants. They are designed to include and unleash everyone in shaping the future.

This alternative approach is both practical and feasible because Liberating Structures are quite simple and easy to learn. They can be used by everyone at every level, from the executive suite to the grassroots. No lengthy training courses or special talents are required. Mastery is simply a matter of practice. LS routinely unleash a vast reserve of contributions and latent innovations waiting to be discovered.

VIDEO: see one Liberating Structure "TRIZ" introduced to a group of doctors, managers, innovators

Every person interested in leading change—in schools, hospitals, foundations, agencies, and businesses—can use Liberating Structures.

Liberating Structures are easy-to-learn microstructures that enhance relational coordination. They quickly foster lively participation in groups of any size, making it possible to truly include and unleash everyone. Liberating Structures are a disruptive innovation that can replace more controlling or constraining approaches.

Click on any Liberating Structure below. 

 

Liberating Structures spark inventiveness by minimally structuring the way we interact while liberating content or subject matter. Very simple constraints unleash creative adaptability, generating better than expected resutls. Individual brilliance and collective wisdom are unbridled. Such a dramatic shift cannot be THAT simple, engaging, and powerful but it is. Read Getting Started if you are ready to liberate yourself.

By design, Liberating Structures distribute control so that participants can shape direction themselves as the action unfolds.

Learning Events

Immersion workshops are a great way to get started. Like a foreign language immersion course that temporarily relocates you away from a familiar culture, a LS immersion experience is a very effective way to learn. There are no presentations, facilitated discussions, status report, or open discussions. Only Liberating Strucutres are practiced.

Below is information and photos from a four-part Seattle Series completed in April 2013. Learning progressed from Liberating Structures use in everyday meetings to big projects to strategy to transforming movements. More information here.

Helpful Analogies

Like Wikipedia, LS create simple rules to guide and liberate everyone’s contributions. Wikipedia’s must-dos and must-not dos specify how anyone can write articles, edit content, reach consensus about the facts, and share with attribution. This structure makes it possible for a diverse community to generate and sustain accurate content that compares favorably with professionally edited encyclopedias. Like Wikipedia, LS is a disruptive innovation in regard to how we engage people in organizations.

Like improv jazz, LS sparks freedom that arises from shared understanding of simple rules. Great jazz comes from playing creatively within the context of melodic and harmonic structure.  Like water in a river, LS takes the shape of the banks that it touches: adapting a similar pattern at every scale and in each local setting.

Like FoldIt (read Novices To Expert Innovators in Biology) LS is a form of crowdsourcing that enables innovation by including and unleashing more people.  

Listen to Keith and Henri presenting a Liberating Structures webinar for the Plexus Institute (90 minutes).  A livelyexchange among 115 participants from Latin America, Europe, Canada and the US... plus a description of how Liberating Structures work in practice and how they are introduced in an immersion workshop. More presentations here.

 

 

Below: watch this inspired video by Professor Arvind Singhal talking about liberating education (and organizations).  UnScripTED: Liberating Structures 

 

Below, enjoy scenes from the LCJP Restorative Justice Summit.  Liberating Structures were used to organize a three day event full of learning, designed to advance the Restorative Justice movement. Restorative Justice (RJ) aims to create communities in which people feel safe by carefully structuring opportunities for offenders to make amends and victims to regain their personal power. Restorative Justice practitioners found Liberating Structures to be highly structured, liberating better than expected results.

2012 CO RJ Summit Video from LCJP on Vimeo.

LS were used to design the Transformation of Nursing summit. Coalitions from all 50 states and DC came together to advance the cause.  Keith was the lead consultant and designer.  

For the United Nations ITC-ILO, Henri and Keith offered a Liberating Structures immersion workshop and follow-up consulting sessions. (The Centre is in Turin Italy.) The focus was how to organize for promoting decent work and sustainable development around the world.

 

Menu of 33 Liberating Structures: