Liberating Structures - the top 4 attributes unleashed!

Co-authors: Stephen Safralidis, Romain Vailleux, Christy Lai, Francesco Vassallo

Do you know the main 4 shared attributes of Liberating Structures?

Neither did we, before attending a workshop on this subject at the LAST Conference in Adelaide, Australia.

During 90 minutes, our group of around 25 people, that barely met before, gathered with no purpose but to learn more about the so-called Liberating Structures.

But at the end of the session, we ended up with a surprising result. With Romain our facilitator actually applying one of the Liberating Structures, we determined and agreed on the 4 most important shared attributes of Liberating Structures. We did it with sticky notes and markers, and open mindsets!

And here is what we found out:

#1 Start with an objective

It is the facilitator’s role to set the goal or the objective of the session. This objective for the workshop allows the participants to have a starting point to begin the process. The analogy of this is like setting rules for a rugby game, but allowing the players to actually play the game accordingly to their own styles, but eventually ending with a result.

The objective needs to be agreed by the participants at the very beginning of the workshop, to prevent discovering at the end that the goal of the workshop was irrelevant. This can be easily managed by saying this simple sentence as the workshop start:

“The objective of the workshop for today is [insert the goal here]. Does anybody have an opinion, a suggestion or an improvement on this objective?”

and wait for at least 10 seconds (which is long if nobody speaks up :))

#2 Provide freedom into clear boundaries

Setting the structure of the session, including adding some clear rules about how participants should behave gives participants the ability to guide the path the session takes, but also provides some structure which ensures everyone plays well together.

These boundaries are large enough to enable participants to use their creativity but they are helpful enough to lead the group to produce a valuable output: it’s a continuous tightrope walk between under-control and over-control.

Some basic rules (such as ensuring everyone has an equal voice, all questions are valid and treating each other with respect) will allow participants to be free with ideas and hopefully lead to better outcomes.

In some context, people are not used to such degrees of freedom: they need a clear statement that authorises them to seize this freedom. And it’s often not instant; they need some time to tone up their creativity out of their usual thinking process.

Finally, the facilitator should make sure that the initial rules of the workshop are accepted by all the participants at each and every moment. And as soon as some participants show signs that they want more freedom, it is possible to change the rules, as long as the participants all agree with the changes suggested.

#3 Make people feel safe in an open environment

Exploiting the most of your freedom is often at your own risk; as an individual, you may come up with some very unexpected proposition, if not weird ones.

And sometimes, you hit/overpass the boundaries of your area of freedom.

When this situation happens, it requires the people around you to be able to evaluate your ideas without judging your person, so that the relationship between you and them is preserved, and the collaboration can go on.

And sometimes, you just have a brilliant idea that changes the perspective and drives the group toward an unforeseeable solution. Fostering psychological safety and permission to fail in a team are key to breakthrough innovation.

Creating an environment where everyone feels safe to express their opinion enables us to benefit from the full knowledge resource of the group. If all voices are equally important and all ideas are valued, we improve the chances of coming up with the best possible solutions.

#4 Everyone’s voice is valuable

Have you ever been in a meeting where there is a person who dominates the conversation, leaving no room for other people to contribute? Liberating Structures encourages and gives opportunities to every workshop attendee to speak up, and also be respected by what they have shared.

It recognises that everyone can and is able to share from the sphere of expertise, and not a single person knows all the solutions to a problem. Just as people say ‘it takes a village to raise a child’, perhaps it may also be true to say that ‘it takes a village to solve a complex problem’.

Conclusions

Liberating Structures empower people to contribute; they organise a way to handle complex problems. Not only they may help you to solve a problem collectively, to build a relationship, to motivate, to start change during the design phase, but also it assures that the group can converge instantly.

So why don’t you ‘have a go’ and ‘let it go’?

The co-authors:

• Stephen Safralidis
• Romain Vailleux
• Christy Lai
• Francesco Vassallo
• and all the 25-something participants to the session "Liberating Structures - An overview of powerful workshop formats" at LAST Conference Adelaide!

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Special comment: How this article has been written

During the LAST Conference in Adelaide, Australia in 2019, a session held by Romain Vailleux (OCTO Technology) led the participants to discover and determine the main shared attributes of the Liberating Structures, through a workshop animated in a Liberating Structures manner (inception!).

The output of the workshop seemed so relevant that Romain suggested that the key attributes (some barely written sticky notes) could be the beginning of a more explicit collective work. This is how the idea of this collective article was born.

The evening of the same day, a shared document was created and all the volunteering participants were invited to join and to give their input in the document.

The co-authoring rules were quite simple:

• Any participant at the workshop can contribute by writing content, suggesting improvement and commenting on the document.
• Content, titles, photos can be edited by any participant.
• The co-authored would sign the document as long as they would have written at least one paragraph.
• [A meeting was set 5 days after to review the document in a conference call with a shared screen. ](but never happened...)

Considering the time invested, the 'collective authoring' seems to be a fairly efficient way to summarize big ideas and to develop some explanation about them. Besides, it enables the attendees to anchor the knowledge they acquired during the session

Credits:

• Photo by Greg Rosenke on Unsplash
• Photo by Edwin Andrade on Unsplash
• Photo by Dawid Zawi?a on Unsplash
• The absence of psychological safety by Jessie Frazelle