My Experience at the First European Liberating Structures Gathering

I've been using Liberating Structures since the day I was introduced to them about 2 years ago in the Agile Coach Camp Madrid.

For those who are not familiar with them, I would say my simplistic version of it, which there are a way to engage people in a thoughtful conversation with the aim of achieving a specific purpose.

I've used them a lot in different context (Ideation Workshops, Strategy Workshops, Retrospectives, Conflict Resolution). Some of them are documented in the following Trello Board.

So my idea is to share the holistic experience of the 2 days I've spent with other 99 Liberators:

Purpose (using Nine Whys)

The main purpose of me attending the Gathering was:

Tap into the knowledge of a wide LS community to foster collaboration on how to help people to find an answer to the most fascinating and uncomfortable questions

It might be fuzzy at first, but I notice if I want to make an impact, I cannot do it just by myself, I'm going to need others along with me.

Furthermore I have a tremendous need of aid people to solve their problems (personally important) while sharing those learnings with the community to reach a larger audience (important to the community).

Having shared that, I would love to walk you through the incredible 2 days and which correlation I've found while reading some books.

Takeaways:

• I've found the design of the agenda for the 2 days purposefully made to share the knowledge collected during the other sessions. Although it shared some rules of the Open Space, there were "Integrated Sessions" where you can shift and share the learnings of the sessions you couldn't attend and connect with other people you might have not known yet. IMPO, superb idea.

• It's incredible the learning you can generate when a safety space is provided. One of the greatest things about LS, is you no need to be an expert to try it. Hence, this is the perfect space to try things and get honest feedback about a particular structure or scenario you have been experimenting with. In this occasion, Keith McCandless introduced to us the Grief Walking structure which is still in development (walking the talk)

The great thing about this is not the structure itself, is the dynamic of sharing and learning together while getting access to all of the voices that have had the chance to participate. It's very confortable and engaging, being curious about what everybody else has to say

Quick side note about the above is while I'm reading the culture code book, one of the skills of highly successful groups Daniel Coyle mentions is Safety. The patterns of interactions he identified in these groups were the moments of social connections. Among them:

* Close physical proximity, often in circles

* Profuse amount of eye contact

* Physical touch (handshakes, fist bumps, hugs)

* Lots of short, energetic exchanges (no long speeches)

* High levels of mixing, everyone talks to everyone

* Few interruptions

* Lots of questions

* Intensive, active listening

* Humor, laughter

* Small, attentive courtesies (thank-yous, opening doors, etc).

I don't know whether it is casualty or not, but all the bullet points were part, at some extent, of the Gathering (in different situations).

• Sharing vulnerability I believe is the best way to describe the how people behaved when they approach the preparation and execution of any of the sessions.

In our last LS MeetUp in Madrid one of the feedbacks I've received while doing our retrospective was, I should have been more "supportive" rather than "taking the situation over" when I thought the thing was not going well.

This is exactly what I've seen in every session when a group stands in front of the rest and carried their performance out. Exchanges of vulnerability, which in my case I tend to avoid, are the pathway through which trusting cooperation is built.

If you extrapolate this to the use of LS in most of the aspects of your life, you can see the structures generate tons of microevents, tons of interpersonal leaps that were made to build closeness and cooperation among people. It's like a muscle, the more you use LS within groups the more you build, piece by piece, the shared mental muscle to connect and cooperate.

As Daniel mentions in his book:

The huge problem here is that, as humans, we have an authority bias that's incredibly strong and unconscious - if a superior tells you to do something, by God we tend to follow it, even when it's wrong.

So the questions here are: How do you create conditions where that doesn't happen? How do you develop the muscle to challenge each other, ask the right question, and never defer to authority?

The simple answer it, having one person tell the other people what to do is not a reliable way to make good decisions. Stop treating people like a cog in the system. This is a slide I've taken from Keith presentation while doing a dynamic about Complex Systems:

If you look in the upper right corner, you gain from disorder & self-ordering and from changing the quality and nature of the interactions.

• Last but not least, I can reckon based on the conversations I've held with other people, at least 5 or 6 context (personal, work, couple, family, relationships) where LS have been applied.

This is the magic and beauty of this, it's not you only have to implement it for work as another facilitation technique (nothing prevents you from doing that), but I would say that we would be watering down the power of the LS.

Here are some other examples we have been discussing during the Gathering:

Conclusion:

There is no doubt that it's been a worthwhile experience. I'll repeat next year (and it will be in Amsterdam!!!! YEAH)

If by any chance you find any interest in any of the thing you have read and would like to introduce them, even just as a tiny experiment in your own environment and you don't know what to do or how to do it, please do reach out to me and I'll share the resources I know and have to help you.

The best thing is I'm not to be the right person, there will be more experienced people who will be willing to give you a hand. Let's spread the word and use of Liberating Structures to foster collaboration and find the answer to the most fascinating and uncomfortable questions.