In today’s VUCA world, leaders are looking for different strategies and frameworks to better engage their team in innovation and problem solving. However, for many leaders, fostering and facilitating inclusive sessions and engaging conversations to derive and assess new ideas become a daunting task. This is where Liberating Structures come into play to democratize discussions and encourage everyone to contribute ideas and insights.
What are Liberating Structures?
Discontent with traditional meeting practices, Henri Lipmanowicz and Keith McCandless created simple everyday exercises to unleash the full potential of collective creativity and intelligence. Today, the Liberating Structures website identifies 33 different structures to organise interactions. Each of these structures is a tried and tested way to ensure active group participation and engagement.
For example, let us consider the liberating structure 1-2-4- All . This particular liberating structure has 4 defined steps:
- Silent self- reflection on a given idea, topic or question (1 min)
- Build on self-reflection and generate ideas as a pair by partnering up (2 mins)
- Form a group of 4 to discuss the ideas generated in step two and come up with a single idea (4 mins)
- Each group should present one idea that stood out in the group to the whole team (5mins)
Following this particular liberating structure helps engage everyone in the team simultaneously to generate and present ideas. Similarly, the other 32 structures too have a defined set of steps and time limit but with varying complexity depending on intended outcome and type of team.
What is in it for Leaders?
1. Better Facilitation: Some of the main challenges of running effective meetings are engagement, focus and consensus. Liberating structures like ‘1-2-4-All’ enhance collaboration and cross pollination even within teams with introverts. Other structures like ‘Fishbowl’ and ‘Debate graph’ fosters open dialogue, multiple perspectives and healthy debates. The beauty of liberating structures lies in it catering to diverse needs and group dynamics, for example, ‘Panarchy’ and ‘15% solutions’ can be used to emphasize the use of objective criteria and metrics to evaluate ideas and decisions. A thorough understanding of the 33 structures and their varying usage will equip leaders in guiding and facilitating effective meetings.
2. Fostering Innovation: Believe it or not, even when limiting structures provide ways to enhance group dynamics, the focus is on the individual. It helps individuals within a group to ideate and communicate without being singled out. Most of the liberating structures encourage individuals to share original ideas through self-reflection. This enables even the most non-participative member to come up with an idea or two which otherwise would not exist. This not only provides a platform to crowdsource ideas but also establishes a space for experimentation.
3. Improve Decision Making process: Liberating structures help faster decision making by facilitating the gathering and synthesis of information by all parties involved. Adopting liberating structures based on meeting objectives and type of audience will greatly benefit the team in arriving at decisions faster. The right liberating structures also creates a platform for healthy discussion of ideas, shortcomings and alternatives helping in faster decision making. Methods like “Critical Uncertainties” and “Ecocycle Planning” assist in prioritizing ideas and aligning efforts towards an identified goal.
4. Empowering ownership and accountability: When ideas are crowdsourced, a leader is able to introduce a culture of ownership and accountability. Inclusive participation and transparent decision making enabled by liberating structures ensure individuals contribute their best ideas and take responsibility for their implementation and success.
Liberating structures provide a powerful tool for leaders to encourage engagement and innovation within their teams. By democratising participation, facilitating open dialogue and promoting divergent thinking, leaders are able to unleash the true potential of their teams. The success for any leader using liberating structures will lie in their ability to identify the objective and match it to the right liberating structure. Going forward, leaders can make use of these to rebuild and reform meeting dynamics and get the most out of their teams.
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