How to hear from everyone in the room?

Communication serves many purposes: sometimes it's as simple as delivering a message from person A to person B. An update, a piece of news, an anecdote, a story, a joke.

Other times, it's about instructions, persuasion, knowledge sharing..

But what about 'when the best thing that can happen between person A and person B' is co-creating? Round robin interactions don't do the "trick". There has to be a better way to hear from everyone in an engaging and participative way.

What we do know is that the more participants talk, the more invested they are and empowered they feel. We want to create an inclusive environment.

This is what Carsten Gr?nbjerg Lützen spoke about in Blackmetric's #businessanalysis community call, as usual expertly led by Adrian Reed.

Carsten calls himself a Playful Agile Coach and he definitely conveys his love for inclusion and how to facilitate truly interactive and engaging workshops.

What are liberating structures?

Liberating structures are formats in which conversations and workshops can be conducted so that:

• Participants feel included?and engaged
• People work well together (and produce much better results)
• We tab into unexpected sources
• Participants work at the top of our intelligence and
• Everybody has the same opportunity to participate and be at their best

What do liberating structures consist of?

#1 Liberating structures need space arranged for pairs, trios, groups of four, circles of people. Take the time to prepare the physical or virtual space (breakout rooms) necessary for a seamless experience.

#2 It is paramount that participants feel invited to the session. Take the time to issue an invitation, both in advance and at the beginning of the session. Invite participants to participate (not just to attend!).

#3 Ensure that you distribute participation, that is to say: organise the session to allow everybody to participate, individually, in small groups and gradually, like a snow ball, amalgamate the output of the participation into larger forums, until communicating to the whole group.

This allows everyone to take part and their voice to be heard by all. Different participants need individual and pair or small groups participation to "warm up": think their ideas through, practise saying them out loud, etc.

#4 Participation only happens if certain sequence "happens" and participants benefit from an allocated time to participate. I repeat the word on purpose: participants need to participate.

#5 Once you choose the structure that you are going to use, think about the groups that you need and how they should be configured. Based on the number of participants, "calculate" the groups and plan it out, for ease of execution.

What to do in "big" workshops?

Some conversations are long. There are many decisions to be made or "big" topics to be broken down, discussed and worked through.

In those cases, one structure is not enough, we need to use a string so that there is a structure to the phases in which a big topic is addressed.

A string is a series of structures and games, like an "agenda".

How to plan strings?

Carsten suggested the use of cards: they are a portable description of all the liberating structures available, so that you/the facilitator can be flexible and pick on the spot the best structure to use.

Essentially the suggestion is to have a "game plan" a sequence of structures to go through but, in parallel, to be open about how you want the session to go and make adjustments as necessary, if necessary.

Having alternative paths/sequences gives you freedom and flexibility to adapt. You can facilitate any structure on the spot by talking the group through it, you don't need flipcharts or any other material

Which liberating structure to pick?

We went through some of the basic structures but the main advice here is to learn and try them out. ;-)

• 1-2-4-all allow introverts to think and make up their minds, those who think by talking out loud their ideas to practise in pairs. By the time ideas are discussed in fours, we are looking for commonalities. It's easy to adapt to 1-3-all or other configurations that suit your group.
• W3: what, so what, what now? very useful to explore in a "sociocratic way" (see my article about sociocracy and self-governance) what happened (what can be observed, experienced) by collecting facts in a round of conversation solely focused on that. On the second round we take our inner teenager out and explore why we care, why it is important to us as a group. The third round of conversation focuses on what's actionable and the outcome is list of 'what would be good'.
• Critical uncertainties allow the group to consider how we move through options and experience where we are and where we would like to be. It is useful to navigate two dimensions (setting up two axis and 4 quadrants). It can be used remotely or present in a room.
• With Ecocycles you can explore the maturity of a group with respect to ideas: do we have them, are we interested in them, should we stop considering them?
• Troika consulting gives you direct access to ideas and input from people. If you set up a triad and take turns to act as a client and two consultants, where the client presents a problem or a request, answers two clarifying questions and subsequently just listens... you will be surprised by what other people already know or can think of about your topic.
• Impromptu networking is a favourite of mine. It can be used as an energiser. Encourage random conversations and make sure you use "tie breakers" about who begins answering the networking question, such as: who travelled the furthest to attend the event?
• Use conversation café to enable groups to make sense of changes or situations. It allows uninterrupted speech, good listening and feedback.
• Crowd sourcing will help you elicit the best ideas from a group.
• 15% solutions will focus your mind on taking action and figure out first steps that are not constrained by funding.
• TRIZ is your friend if you want to stop counterproductive behaviours in a group.

Just remember.. for example, on the back of TRIZ, you can move onto 15% solutions and figure out how to take the first steps to act on new behaviours that you want to adopt.

Go on! Give them a try and tell us how you get on!