Galvanising Everyone to Navigate Turbulence: How Kiwi Leaders Can Sustain Engagement During an Economic Downturn

As an economic recession looms, uncertainty and anxiety are undoubtedly rising across New Zealand organisations. In such destabilising times, employee engagement and trust in leadership often erode. People start feeling powerless and alienated, wondering if their perspectives matter. Productivity and creativity can nosedive, further compounding the challenges.?

Before becoming a leadership coach and facilitator, I worked in organisations in New Zealand, Australia, Brazil, Chile, Spain and the United Kingdom. Whenever times got tough, I noticed a common pattern: leadership became more insular and controlling, and as a result, many talented people left the organisation. This experience taught me that in times of crisis, the natural instinct to clamp down on control can actually accelerate disengagement and employee turnover.

In times of crisis, the natural instinct to clamp down on control can actually accelerate disengagement and employee turnover.

Organisational psychology shows us the key to weathering storms of uncertainty and disengagement is not to clamp down control but rather to give people even more voice and agency. When individuals feel a genuine sense of ownership and ability to make a difference, they go above and beyond to help their organisations adapt.

Liberating Structures: Unleashing collective leadership

Kiwi leaders can distribute authority and sustain engagement during turbulence by using Liberating Structures (LS). These ingeniously simple meeting and workshop processes enable everyone to be a leader - without the need for long instructions or facilitator control. By unleashing the full participation and intelligence of groups within well-designed constraints, LS helps galvanise the collective commitment and ingenuity needed to navigate downturns.

Motivation: The psychology of engagement

The effectiveness of Liberating Structures can be understood through the lens of self-determination theory, which posits that humans have three core psychological needs: autonomy, competence, and relatedness. When these needs are met, intrinsic motivation and well-being flourish. LS processes directly support these needs in tangible ways.

Firstly, LS gives people genuine autonomy to self-organise and make meaningful choices within clear constraints. This satisfies the need for self-direction and control over one's own work. Secondly, LS draws on the existing knowledge and skills of participants, affirming their competence and ability to contribute. Finally, the highly interactive and often playful nature of LS fosters relatedness, building a sense of connection and belonging among team members.

By supporting these fundamental human needs, Liberating Structures creates the motivational conditions for people to engage fully and go the extra mile during challenging times.

Wicked Questions: Surfacing the real conversations

For example, the Wicked Questions LS surfaces the most critical, difficult-to-discuss concerns that might otherwise remain unspoken. The standard opening question is “What opposing-yet-complementary strategies do we need to pursue simultaneously in order to be successful?”?

Examples relevant in today’s economic climate could include:

• How can we radically reduce costs AND also dramatically improve customer experience and loyalty?
• How can we view the economic downturn as the perfect opportunity to address our persistent internal dysfunction and inefficiencies AND also maintain focus on our core business objectives?
• How can we turn our limited resources into a source of focus, creativity, and competitive advantage AND also meet the growing expectations of our stakeholders?

“What opposing-yet-complementary strategies do we need to pursue simultaneously in order to be successful?”

This encourages people to look beyond simple “either-or” answers and see the complex challenges and opportunities in a situation. Wicked Questions highlight how opposite but connected forces are always influencing our actions, especially during times of change. By using this method, groups can safely discuss the differences between official plans and what's really happening on the ground. This opens up space to discover valuable strategies that may not have been obvious at first.??

Rather than executives deciding behind closed doors, people have candid conversations about the dilemmas that most affect them. Leaders build trust and buy-in by openly grappling with the wicked questions and co-creating novel solutions with those most impacted.

Panarchy: Reframing crisis as opportunity

Another useful LS is Panarchy, which helps people understand the bigger context of transformational change. Like Herminia Ibarra’s concept of "outsight", Panarchy provides a wider lens to reframe local crises in terms of broader systemic opportunities. It provides a “thinking together” process that develops people’s ability to see beyond themselves and their individual perspective.

Panarchy helps groups understand challenges and identify opportunities to act on them. It shows how different levels of a system, from small to large, are connected and influence each other. An starting question is "What are the smallest-to-the-largest factors influencing your/our chances for success?". Participants then translate the factors into levels and create labels for each level.

By using Panarchy, people can see opportunities to share innovations across these levels. They learn how changes at one level might free up resources or create openings for ideas to grow at another level. Panarchy also uses the concept of the "Ecocycle" to understand the dynamics at play. With this understanding, groups can find the right moments to introduce new ideas and help them spread throughout the whole system.?

Picture this: a room full of brilliant medical faculty, all grappling with the complex challenges of improving outcomes for themselves and their students in a medical university system. Where do they even begin? This is where Panarchy comes in. In a recent leadership development programme, I had the privilege of guiding these faculty members through the Panarchy process. It was like watching a lightbulb moment ripple across the room. As they mapped out the different levels of their university system they began to see their challenges in a whole new light.

Suddenly, they weren't just isolated individuals struggling against a monolithic institution. They were agents of change, identifying opportunities to influence and innovate at every level. The energy in the room was electric as they started to brainstorm and collaborate across levels. By the end of the session, these medical educators saw how their individual actions could contribute to systemic change, and how by working together across levels, they could create transformative outcomes for themselves, their students, and their entire university community.

That's the power of Panarchy - it helps people see the forest and the trees, and empowers them to take action at every level to create the change they want to see. Even when people can't control macro-economic policies or strategies, they start to see creative ways to evolve their everyday work.

Navigating Complexity through experimentation

This ability to embrace emergence and innovation is critical for navigating what complexity expert Dave Snowden calls the "complex" quadrant of his Cynefin framework. In complex environments, like a recession, there are no clear right answers or predictable outcomes. Instead, leaders must adopt a probe-sense-respond approach, running safe-to-fail experiments to discover what works in the new context.

Liberating Structures excel at enabling this kind of collaborative experimentation. For example, Improv Prototyping is a fun and engaging way to tackle tough challenges. It brings together a group of people to act out potential solutions to persistent problems. Through short, improvised sketches, participants identify and demonstrate simple elements that could help resolve the issue at hand. These ideas are then built up piece by piece, creating a set of actions that can be used individually or combined in various ways. By approaching serious work with a spirit of playfulness, Improv Prototyping helps teams unlock their creativity and find innovative paths forward.

Here's some examples of where Improv Prototyping has been used:

• Hospital trainers have substituted Improv Prototyping for conventional courses
• For sales reps to invent new ways to interact with their customers
• For managers to make their interactions with people who report to them more productive

By engaging everyone in ongoing innovation, LS helps build the organisational agility and resilience needed to adapt to complex, rapidly evolving circumstances. Leaders create the conditions for emergent solutions to arise from the collective creativity of their teams.

Turning turbulence into transformation

In this way, Liberating Structures helps transform our relationship to unsettling times. Rather than breeding paralysis and fear, upheaval becomes a galvanising invitation for everyone to lead change. And by giving people real agency to navigate their own corner of the chaos, LS provide an antidote to learned helplessness.

As we steer into the coming economic headwinds, Kiwi leaders have a choice. We can fall back on command-and-control instincts and risk a dispirited, rigid organisation. Or we can lean into the innate motivation, wisdom and adaptivity of our people by radically distributing control. Liberating Structures offers versatile methods to unleash the collective grit and ingenuity we'll need from everyone to weather the storm. When people feel genuine ownership, competence and connection, together we can turn turbulence into transformational opportunity.

Further information on Liberating Structures

https://www.liberatingstructures.com/

https://davidbennettcoach.com/workshops/

https://davidbennettcoach.com/liberating-motivation/

Author bio?

David is a seasoned practitioner of Liberating Structures, having learned directly from Keith McCandless , one of the approach's developers. In 2019, David had the unique opportunity to be part of the design and delivery team for immersion workshops with Keith in Sydney, Lima, Buenos Aires, and Santiago. These experiences deepened his understanding and application of Liberating Structures. He attends the LS Slowdown and LS Speculations online workshops offered by S. Fisher Qua and Anna Kathleen Jackson in their Lucky Hunch collaboration.

David offers 1, 2 and 3 day LS immersion workshops for organisations and runs an LS user group in ōtautahi Christchurch. He integrates Liberating Structures into his individual and team coaching practice, helping clients unlock creativity, foster collaboration, and navigate complex challenges.

He partners with experienced executive and team coach Alyson Keller (PCC, ICF) to deliver team coaching programs that leverage Liberating Structures to elevate effectiveness and impact for senior leadership teams across Asia Pacific.

David partners with Shona Munro PhD , an expert in learning transfer and embodied practices. As mindbodyleaders - embodied leadership development they deliver the Embodied Leadership Essentials programme. This programme incorporates Liberating Structures to help leaders develop the essential skills to lead using the wisdom of their whole body intelligence, not just their brains.

David collaborates with Marilyn J. Bugenhagen, a renowned leadership and learning alchemist, to design and deliver transformative developmental leadership programmes. Their most recent partnership involved creating and facilitating the "Leading as Faculty" programme at Rosalind Franklin University of Medicine and Science in Chicago. Liberating Structures were incorporated to foster meaningful learning experiences for faculty leaders.