Liberating Structures: Let's end boring meetings

Would you like every meeting, or event, you attend to feel involving and fulfilling?

Few people say they look forward to going to meetings at work. They tend to be based on a small number of formats (presentation, discussion, brainstorm) in which the loudest voices get to say the most.

Liberating Structures offers 33 different formats (with more in development), all carefully designed to involve everybody and produce clear benefits. Last week Happy was proud to host the sold-out London Liberating Structures Immersion Workshop (organising it with David Heath and the Liberating Structures Meetup group).

People loved that it was "super interactive", the "creativity and easy flow of the sessions", "the speed of the practices, the focus on experience, the warmth of facilitators" and more. So what are the structures?

1) Mad Hatter Tea Party: Whole room groups into two circles, facing each other. Discuss question on screen for 60 seconds, move to next person, discuss new question. "Stay curious, dig deep, have fun."

A form of speed networking, its a very efficient way to get people up and moving and discussing whatever issues you want to look at (or recap on what you have looked at).

For this event the questions included "something I'll be thinking about today", "what first inspired me in this work", "what I hope can happen for us" and more.

2) 124All: 1 minute thinking on own on issue, 2 minutes in pair, 4 minutes in four then whole group discussion

I often get people to break into pairs but this adds the chance for individuals to reflect (good for introverts) and gives two rounds that everybody can contribute to. This can be used in any meeting to start a new topic or reflect on what's been said.

3) Triz: Small groups, what actions would lead to the worst possible outcome, explore which of those actions you are doing.

We looked at what would lead to total burn out. Responses included working too long hours, not taking breaks, not giving yourself time to reflect. not getting enough sleep. Were people doing any of these? Certainly. Virtually everybody left the session with something they planned to change.

At Happy we used it to ask what actions would cause the company to go bankrupt and explored which of these we were doing, and there were some. (Though we've just had a very successful year.)

(Triz stands for Teoriya Resheniya Izobretatelskikh Zadach, which is Russian for the Theory of Solving Ingenious Problems.)

4) Troika: Groups of three, one person describes problem, other two ask questions. First person turns back while the other two discuss the issue for 5 minutes, then feeds back on what they heard.

One of the facilitators had done this with a conference of 240 people, exploring health issues. Every person gets the chance to get a new perspective on their own challenge but also to give ideas to two others.

5) Conversation cafe: Groups of 5 to 7, state the theme, each person gives their thoughts in turn for one minute (with a "talking stick"), then another 1 minute each reflecting back on what they've heard, then open discussion and sharing of take aways.

The format enables everybody to contribute on an equal basis. The topic at the workshop was "what are your personal experiences of feeling overwhelmed?", and in our group it got to quite a profound place in less than half an hour. People openly shared where they were finding things difficult, creating a remarkable connection between those involved.

It can be done as successfully with any business topic.

6) 25/10 Crowd Sourcing: Each person puts an idea or response on a card. People move around, swapping cards, then score the new card out of 5. Repeat 5 times to get a score out of 25. Find the best scoring ideas.

This was used at the OneTeamGov conference in the summer. With 700 participants, it extracted around 60 workshop topics for the day - from the highest scoring cards - in around 25 minutes.

7) Spiral Journal: Take two minutes to slowly draw a spiral in the centre of a piece of paper. Divide the paper into four sections and, two minutes each, answer four questions.

This gives a chance to take the bspace to reflect and then address specific questions. Ours were "what I'm feeling?", "whats happening to me emotionally?", "what I'm thinking about", "what I need from today".

This can be used at the start of a meeting or be a nice break after lots of discussion.

These are less than half of those we covered in the two day workshop and you can find the full 33 at the Liberating Structures web site. Originally designed by Keith McCandless and Henri Lipmanowicz, they have established a Creative Commons licence for them. This means anybody can use them, anybody can teach them.

The core idea is that having a clear structure produces a much more involving and focused result than the usual free-for-all. "Like improv jazz, LS sparks freedom that arises from shared understanding of simple rules." 

A big thanks to Anna Jackson and Fisher Qua, who came over from Texas and Seattle, respectively, to facilitate the event. Also to David Heath who organised the event with Happy, and runs a monthly Liberating Structures London Meetup on the 4th Tuesday of the month, and all the facilitators. Find them on Twitter.

We will be organising further Liberating Structures Workshops in London, and maybe elsewhere. And we hope to also one one day introductions. If you'd like to know more, contact me on [email protected].

Let's put an end to boring meetings and dull presentations.