Pathways to Fluency and Routine Use
Where you sit in an organization influences not only your first steps but also the subsequent paths you can take to develop fluency in the use of Liberating Structures. Here are five ways to get started, no matter what your position.
For Senior Leaders
Senior leaders with resources can quickly engage many other people with workshops for some two hundred people at a time (see Immersion Workshops) and they can also put in place mechanisms to encourage dissemination and to support a growing number of applications.
A senior leader who personally becomes a visible regular user sends a powerful invitation to the entire organization to join in the experiment. From this, a critical mass can emerge to overcome the huge inertia of conventional practices that dominate existing work systems.
We use the word “invitation” purposely because we believe that it is not a good idea for leaders to use their authority to impose Liberating Structures. Instead, we advise creating opportunities for people to learn and allowing them to implement at their own pace and at their own level of comfort.
We believe that the use of Liberating Structures will best flourish when it is left to grow through the enthusiasm and energy of spontaneous adopters.
So the role of leaders is not to impose but to provide lots of support where it is wanted and welcomed. In addition, they need to be regular users themselves for there is absolutely no other way for them to fully make sense of what Liberating Structures can contribute to the performance of their organization.
Leaders have many opportunities every day to start practices that can easily be copied by others in their organization. For instance, replacing conventional meeting agendas with “storyboards” will inevitably support the use of Liberating Structures since they always specify for each session not just its purpose but also the detailed structure that will be used to achieve the purpose.
The use of Liberating Structures spreads most effectively when people experience and discover what they make possible.
For leaders, this means creating opportunities for people to be exposed to Liberating Structures in workshops or making it easy for people to learn them in partnership with others. It means supporting the development of communities of practice in all organizational functions so that people can easily network and learn peer-to-peer. It means encouraging experiments and disseminating news of both successes and failures.
Managers, Individual Contributors, Solo Practitioners
In contrast to senior leaders, managers, frontline workers, and professionals such as educators or nurses are unlikely to have access to a lot of resources. So their starting point will not be a workshop but a single application of one Liberating Structure or a small number of structures in connection with a meeting with their team or colleagues. In our experience, small but frequent steps, with a thorough debrief after each step, are the most effective way to proceed.
We always advocate working with a partner as it makes the learning process so much more effective, faster, safer, and fun.
We are frequently asked, “I want to start using Liberating Structures myself, but how can I convince the people around me to start using them?” Our answer always is, “Don’t try to convince anybody, words will not do it but experiences will.” In other words, just use a Liberating Structure at your first opportunity and let those who like it learn from you. Then use your next opportunity, and the next, and so on.
Let people discover and convince themselves of the value of Liberating Structures through the experiences you create.
Remember too that all new users of Liberating Structures have the potential to initiate a community of practice if they choose to. It starts with getting one partner and then being deliberate in attracting and supporting new users by offering assistance or by inviting them to observe. We have seen many instances where adopters of Liberating Structures have been asked to run small workshops as a way of spreading the practice – for example, two to three hours covering a few basic structures. Or they were asked to help with designing or facilitating a meeting. Spread can be spontaneous or planned.
Internal or External Consultants
For internal or external consultants with influence but limited resources, starting to use Liberating Structures in work with their closest clients is the most effective way to get started. As their experience builds, they will soon have to make a choice between keeping their new expertise for their own benefit or turning as many of their customers as possible into users. The latter obviously is the more powerful strategy, but it requires that the consultant become a coach and teacher in addition to a being a proficient user.
This will translate into codesigning and co-facilitating with individual clients and will likely require eventually going beyond individual coaching by organizing workshops for small or large groups.
As the work progresses, it is likely to involve navigating up the organization in order to engage and get the support of leaders in more senior positions than one’s initial clients. It may not be an easy transition for a consultant to, as quickly as possible, hand off responsibilities for facilitating Liberating Structures to others.
After all, this is like giving away one’s reason for existence and looks like a lousy business model. Who is going to need you if at every step you share your experience and invite new users to take over and expand their practice? While this may sound like a legitimate concern, the scope of what needs to be accomplished to help an organization get the full benefit of
Liberating Structures is so vast that no single consultant is likely to run out of work. Expansion or promotion is the much more likely scenario. Ripples will turn into waves.
Especially for anybody who learns Liberating Structures by reading instead of direct experience, 1-2-4-All is a very good place for a safe start (see description in the Field Guide or in Chapter 3). It is such an effective structure that any meeting would have to be exceptionally unusual not to offer at least one opportunity for using 1-2-4-All to good advantage. So start with this structure, and when you feel comfortable, try another. There are more than a dozen easy structures that are sufficiently simple to jump into and try out – for instance, Troika Consulting; Impromptu Networking; Appreciative Interviews; What, So What, Now What?; Conversation Café; Nine Whys; Wise Crowds; 15% Solutions.
The next step is for you to move up the boldness ladder by combining two or more structures.
Then find others who love the work and share stories with one another. Experiment with Liberating Structures in as many aspects of your life as you dare to; they not only have a place at work but also at school, in your family, and in your social circles.
When getting started with facilitating LS, it is useful to break the facilitation role into components. If working with another person, you can share responsibility for leading each part.
- Inviting (clarifying what this particular LS makes possible and making a concise invitation to participants)
- Specifying the mechanics (timing, sequence, groups, use of space)
- Maintaining structure (actively fixing hiccups as the LS unfolds)
- Debriefing on the experience (What happened? What was structured? What was liberated? Are there other settings you can imagine using this LS?)
