The surprising power of liberating structures (book by Lipmanowisc and McCandless)

The surprising power of liberating structures

Henri Lipmanowisc and Keith McCandless

Liberating Structures

This book is about making human interactions more productive. Most people complain about meetings, whether they are organizers or participants. The authors suggest that one reason is that we have a very limited “alphabet” for structuring meetings. A larger vocabulary would enable meetings to be structured in ways that were more satisfactory to both organizers and participants.

When people interact, there is always a structure guiding the interaction. The structure might be based on cultural status roles, the purpose of the interaction (according to one party) or an organizational hierarchy, for example.  Even the arrangement of furniture or a room can impose a structure on interaction. Structures can be tangible like a building, room or table. The structure can be intangible like a strategy, discussion format or agenda. Some structures are macrostructures. A building’s design can be a tangible macrostructure. Examples of intangible microstructures include strategies, organizational structure, the collection of policies and procedures, or core processes. Some tangible microstructures might be the layout of a room, style of furniture, or room purpose (think about the contrast between a cafeteria and a conference room, both have a table and chairs, both could be used to eat and talk, but our behavior is likely quite different in the two spaces). This book is primarily devoted to intangible microstructures, which will be discussed in more detail in following paragraphs.

How we interact is primarily guided by intangible microstructures and we don’t think about them much. Many organizations have some sort of “model” that describes how things get done that describe the macrostructures, the roles and responsibilities of people, and the resources that can be used to get things done. How the macrostructures and resources are used by people is mediated by the microstructures that the people use.

The five common microstructures are the presentation, managed discussion, status report, brainstorm, and open discussion. These are the structures we use to organize a meeting. At one extreme the presentation has one active participant, who is in control, with all of the rest of the participants passive. The communication is one way, “power” is imbalanced, the content is highly predictable, and there is little engagement between participants. In contrast the open discussion has multidirectional communication, power is widely distributed, has relatively unpredictable content, and potentially high engagement between participants. There are times when the purpose of the interaction suits a presentation structure, perhaps when there is little need for engagement. There are other times when the purpose may suit the open discussion structure, perhaps when there is no need for control. But many times, there is a need for a moderate degree of control and engagement. In these cases, the presentation exerts too “tight” a control and the open discussion too “loose” a control.

The book describes 33 additional microstructures that represent a variety of intermediate outcomes.

All microstructures have five elements. The invitation sets out the purpose or question for the group to address and explains how the group will achieve the purpose. The space/materials describe the use of resources like room set-up, flip charts/displays, and whether people will stand or sit. Participation describes who will participate and what form participation will take. In particular, it describes how much each participant will participate. Group configuration involves whether the group works as a whole, in smaller sub-groups or changes groupings during the interaction. The steps are the series of activities performed by the group and the time allocated to each step. The typical 60 minute presentation might involve a room arranged with seats facing a screen where one person will speak for 55 minutes followed by 2-3 questions from the listeners. The speaker will switch and the pattern repeated until time expires. In contrast, an open discussion might be set up so that people can face each other, anybody can speak (but not for too long), and people will take turns speaking until time expires. In each of the microstructures described, only one person is speaking at a time, so participation is actually relatively low.

The authors describe the additional structures as liberating because they provide different ways to organize the five elements to increase participation and change the balance of power between participants. The importance of these changes depends on the situation. In an organization with a strong hierarchy, different viewpoints expressed by more junior participants struggle to be heard. Imagine how easily the ideas and opinions of a captain will be heard in a room full of generals. A microstructure that gives the captains’ ideas the same status as the generals’ ideas would be liberating. Imagine the difficulty of having a group of 100 people suggest and select ideas for a plan of execution. An open discussion would not lead to the desired convergence, but the right microstructure might lead to efficient convergence and liberate the group from the chaos of choice.

The authors make the point that improving group interactions can be done by anyone working within their own role. Liberating structures do not need to be introduced from the top down, but they can be. They don’t need to be introduced as a “program” or “best practice” but they could be. They probably should not be introduced or learned all at one time. Far better, to find a microstructure that seems helpful and practice using it. The authors observe that if this was a book about tennis or ping pong, you would know that mastering the skills required practice. You would not expect to be successful on the first try. Instead, you would try the new skill and learn by doing. As your skill increased, you might add additional skills. This is the approach that you should take to learning these liberating structures. Get started and practice.

Too much of the book is spent trying to convince the reader that microstructures matter and that additional types are beneficial. But finally, the book becomes a field guide to using the structures. Rather than attempt to condense 33 microstructures for this summary, the complete list can be found at: http://www.liberatingstructures.com/ls-menu . Each microstructure is laid out from invitation to steps. Three of them will be described in condensed fashion to illustrate some features of the structures.

1-2-4-All

The structure involves everyone right from the beginning to gather ideas or input. People should have writing materials.

1. Present the invitation to participants by presenting the challenge or question as a personal challenge. For example, ‘What would you do to increase/decrease/eliminate/create/etc. X?”
2. Each person thinks quietly for one minute and writes down their response.
3. People get into pairs and for 2 minutes discuss their responses.
4. Then pairs join to form fours and discuss their responses for four minutes.
5. Groups describe their most interesting or ‘best’ response to the whole group in 5 minutes. For large groups, only a few responses may be discussed.

Enforce silence in the first minute and then stick to the timing. While responses are being discussed, they are not being decided on. Collect all of the written responses. In some meetings, this activity will go on to another to develop or select response for action.

TRIZ

This is a process to identify counter-productive activities, behaviors and processes. Everybody in involved. People should be organized into small groups (less than 7) with writing materials.

1. Present the invitation in the form of a question like, ‘What can we do to insure the worst possible outcome for our effort to achieve X?” If needed, have a brief discussion to pick the outcome to target.
2. Groups prepare a list of activities to insure a terrible outcome for 10 minutes.
3. Make a second list of all existing activities that in any way resemble those on the first list. People need to be honest and imaginative in this stage to find the parallels. Work for 10 minutes.
4. Each group goes through its second list and picks a few items to stop. Work for 10 minutes.

The answer is NOT to do something new, but to stop doing something currently done. In debriefing, have the group identify who else needs to be involve in “stopping”. (Though the authors named this structure TRIZ, it is just a small subset of the TRIZ problem solving method)

User Experience Fishbowl

This is a structure to gain insights by listening to an “expert” conversation.

1. Given a problem, a small group of people with direct experience of the problem or its solution are gathered. They are placed in a circle of chairs in the middle of a room facing each other. In the audience is large, it may be useful to put the experts on bar stools or a raised floor to make them more visible to the audience. Microphones may also be placed in the inner circle to insure that all can hear.
2. The audience is seated on the outside of this circle in small groups.
3. Present the problem to the experts and invite them to discuss the problem among themselves for 10-25 minutes. This is critical, they should be acting as if there is no audience – as if they were driving in a car or sitting at a bar.
4. The audience listen and watches the exchange. They should write down questions that they have.
5. At the end of the inner circle discussion, small groups discuss and formulate questions for 2-5 minutes. The inner circle turns their chairs around so they face the audience.
6. The audience asks questions and the experts answer them for another 10-25 minutes.

The authors observe that different microstructures can be used in series to help a group work through an issue. One microstructure can be used to identify concerns and a different one to converge on an action plan. The book contains some examples and more are available on the website.

Our organizations face a growing need to tap into all of the insight available to our employees and the traditional microstructures for communication are not up to the job. Some of these microstructures may increase our groups’ capacities and more microstructures are being developed all the time; many are published online.

Comment and interpretation:

• In looking through the 33 structures, many are familiar but executed in a slightly different way. In that sense, the “aha” moment of the book may be that we recognize the constraints that the big 5 microstructures place on our group capability and more frequently use alternatives. Many of the familiar techniques come from the world of continuous improvement, quality improvement or innovation where there can be a strong drive to break conventional thinking patterns in order to find a root cause or deeper insight. For example, the TRIZ example above is also known as “Reversal” in the creative tool world. There is a structure called 9 whys – which is suspicious similar to 5 Whys from root cause analysis. Consequently, the call to action for this book might be to be more conscious that many of our meetings are poorly structured to achieve goals related to engaging people and converging on action. More conscious design could improve our productivity.
• Here is an interesting quote. “The aspects of things that are most important to us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity.” Ludwig Wittgenstein
• The authors don’t mention this, but I am struck by a corollary to these structures. They train us to behave in a certain way. We know that our role during a Power Point presentation is to be quiet. We are being instructed or informed, we are not required to think. In a managed discussion, the course of the conversation has been pre-determined and we are enacting the detail. We may even “know” that an open discussion is not expected to lead to anything, so we can say almost whatever we want. One consequence of this training is that we are frustrated by most meetings. We can’t get what we want as organizers and don’t feel like we are adding value as participants. If liberating structures change those outcomes, they will easily be worth the time spent to learn to use them effectively.
• I learned about liberating structures in a book about military planning. The juxtaposition was fascinating because you don’t immediately associate military thinking with liberated thinking. The stereotype is pretty much the opposite. As that book made clear, good military planning suffers when people can’t/don’t/won’t speak up and express objections to flawed analysis and planning. Bad planning kills people and loses wars, so it is vital to overcome the urge to submit to those in superior roles. These liberating structures have been proven to work in that environment. It seems like quite the endorsement.