A guest post by my friend and colleague, Philip Clark (bios at end of post for Philip and Lynda!)
“Here is a test to find whether your mission on Earth is finished: If you’re alive, it isn’t.” Richard Bach
Within the larger Liberating Structures network there is a community of practice devoted to the development and understanding of Strategy Knotworking (SK), a set of six questions, often explored using various Liberating Structures (LS). SK lends itself to complex contexts and where there is a desire to engage everyone in planning.
This is the third installment (here is the first, here is the second) of takeaways from the various conversations that we have been fortunate to have with seasoned practitioners on Strategic Knotworking (SK). The entry focuses on Lynda Frost.
One of Lynda’s distinctive professional marks is her vast competence and experience in both strategic planning and facilitating Liberating Structures (LS). In fact, when it comes to LS, she undoubtedly falls in Everett Roger’s “early adopter” category. Her use of LS is not only fluent, it can be pervasive.
So it is worth paying attention when she remarks that SK is not primordially a strategic planning tool. People familiar with prior blogs may remember that the issue of execution, or operational savvy or action planning were matters of concern for other practitioners as well. For Lynda, SK essentially serves to explore, share and socialize important, critical strategic content but is not geared to finalizing a written strategic plan. Other tools do it better. To use her own words, SK is a great way “to navigate the strategic process.”
Different questions different insights, different LS different tones
New tools bring new questions and new outlooks. For instance, David La Piana – Lynda’s inspiration for strategic planning for her nonprofit clients – talks about Comparative Advantages [His exact expression is “competitive advantage” but Lynda prefers “comparative advantage”] i.e., the unique skills that an organization possesses which Lynda uses to articulate Context.
This switch is not neutral since the notion of Comparative Advantage has deep strategic roots ever since Michael Porter’s article in 1979; more importantly it shifts the attention from external influences by linking them to internal capacities.
Lynda’s interview offers a wealth of insights. Here are 3 takeaways:
- The importance of preparation (sponsorship, leadership, planning team, and the use of LS)
- The centrality of Purpose and its extension to mission and values
- Insight about SK: a) with regard to strategy and strategy planning, and b) about the choice of LS.
Process
Like most significant consulting interventions, obtaining approval for a participatory strategic workshop usually involves a series of critical steps. Here are some elements worth considering.
Step 1 with the executive team: the job consists in understanding the group dynamics, setting clear goals, checking for commitment, and evaluating the compatibility of the organization’s culture with the LS mindset among other things.
One of the most important factor is group dynamics, that is the level of cooperation between people. If an organization is marred with conflict, tension, infighting, any approach to collective action should start with some form of reconciliation. In this context, Appreciative Interviews because it describes situations at their best can be an effective structure to build (or repair frazzled) relationships while gaining substantive insights to inform the planning process. Group’s dynamics will also impact how groups will be formed: will they be a mix people and functions, or will they follow the organization’s chart?
Step 2 the Planning team: It’s function is to lay out the retreat’s purpose, structure, goals and participation. At this stage, it is key to have diverse perspectives within the group.
This is when Lynda will introduce LS both as a canvas (or metastructure) and/or as a set of tools. As it is, Purpose to Practice can provide the overall blueprint whereas individual LS will be used to address specific instances such as scoping, setting rules, principles, participation, etc. As a result, the planning team will be somewhat familiar with LS before the start of the strategy meetings.
Lynda will also walk the Planning team through more complex structures that she will use during the strategy sessions; often these include her two favorite LS : Ecocycle Planning and Critical Uncertainties (CU).
The Planning team should meet 2 to 3 times before a 1-2 day workshop to ensure thorough preparation.
Step 3 facilitating the retreat: the intensive phase of the work is often an in-person or virtual retreat between a half day and 1.5 days over a weekend, with smaller online co-planning meetings leading up to the retreat and following up as a debrief and accountability tool.
It matters what matter matters
The second characteristic of Lynda’s practice I chose to share with you concerns Purpose writ large. Purpose, you’ll recall, is step 1 in SK. It is also the 10th principle of LS “Never start without a clear Purpose” which, experience shows, especially resonates with nonprofit organizations.
Lynda will spend a fair amount of time making sure a good purpose statement or mission statement will resonate with the participants. Like she says : “ I want them to really feel like they’re looking at that mission, they’re reading it and they’re thinking about it before we get into anything else.”
To insure adhesion, she will avoid “mission or purpose language” preferring a more oblique approach. For example, she may start with something like “what is the fundamental value of your organization?” or “how did you first get involved with the organization?” or even, in cases where there are a number of new people in the room, with a prompt on their engagement to insure their inclusion and boost their confidence.
If the group is small, she will use Impromptu Networking to gather stories, perspectives, ideas. If the group is larger, she will opt for 1-2-4-all. If it is online, she will favor Chatterfall .
In a longer version, she will favor 9 word purpose statements over 9Whys. Purpose, mission or vision are so central for Lynda that her final report will rate each strategic initiative based on its alignment with the mission as well as other key criteria identified by the group [For example, a strategic initiative might be rated based on 4 criteria: the consistency with the mission, the organization’s competitive advantages, the organization’s capacity to implement, and the financial viability of the initiative].
Jamming with SK
Exploring new prompts
I said it several times before, one of the greatest feature of SK is its malleability. With Michelle, we saw that when an organization is fraught with tensions, history could provide a good basis for reconciliation. Context then is not just “What is happening around us that demands a fresh approach?” It can be “where do we come from and what has been lost that could be rekindled”. With Lynda, as we have seen, Context can become “what is/are our comparative advantage(s)?” In other words, “what is it that we do or have or built that is unique and attractive to our clients or users or beneficiaries?”
Mixing asynchronous and synchronous activities
Because time is precious and thinking slow, Lynda doesn’t hesitate to mix asynchronous work with synchronous activities. This is the case with the comparative advantage. Participants are asked to look at adjacent organisations prior to the workshop to get a sense of what they do differently. Once in the workshop with the content ready at hand, they can quickly discuss what makes them unique (smoother communications, quicker decision making, better delivery, etc.…) and converge using 1-2-4-all.
Favorite structures
Lynda’s favorite LS for strategy work are Ecocycle Planning and Critical Uncertainties (CU)
As a rule of thumb, she wants to get Ecocycle up and running as soon as possible in the workshop, usually at the end of the morning. Ecocycle allows people to map their activities whether they are just talked about, getting traction, fully mature and running out of steam. It is all about doing. It can also level-set the group, informing newer members and giving long-term participants a place to gather historical and current initiatives.
CU will come in to get a broader view, and guide strategic planning, not just built resilience. One remembers that CU consists in two perpendicular axis. The first one is about uncertainty: what is most uncertain and what is less in your situation. The second is about criticality: again what is most critical and what is less.
When working with nonprofit organisations, Lynda suggests money for the uncertain axis. In other words, will money be available or not. And for the critical axis, the policies in place; are they enabling or are they limiting. This brings a strategic layer to Ecocycle and allows for the selection of activities going forward according to the scenarii discussed in CU.
Keep it simple keep it moving
If I were to summarize Lynda’s approach to Strategy, the words that come to my mind are “keep it simple, keep it moving”.
Simplicity starts with using the right kind of language. It then translates into the use of simple LS such Impromptu Networking, 1-2-4-all, Conversation Café. For example, 1-2-4-all can be used to determine the comparative advantages, the values of an organisation or even purpose, and/or its ambitions. You can also simplify the process by fully taking stock of what a given LS can give. For example, ambitions can also be derived from Ecocycle. And Conversation Café turns out to be very effective at identifying existing and emerging priorities.
Now of course Lynda’s repertoire is much larger than this and she will, given the right opportunity, include User Experience Fishbowl to bring lived experience into the process, and 25/10 and Shift and Share to decide on which initiative to pursue. More playful structures in development can serve other purposes. A favorite one is Drawing Monsters to address concerns or fears about changes associated with a new strategic plan.
The simplicity of these structures also allows for a nice rhythm to set in. But it seems to me that the real momentum is due to a focus on concrete actions from the get go. First, there is what can be called a standard operating model applicable to almost all small and medium nonprofit. Then there is the marriage of specific planning tools – themselves streamlined – with LS. For example, selecting priorities is made easier by the customized “strategy screen” measuring each potential initiative on a scale of 1 to 5 around key criteria such as alignment with purpose, enhancement of comparative advantage, feasibility, and financial viability.
The switch from Context to Comparative Advantage also emphasizes concreteness by zooming on known strengths and/or developing news ones. The way Critical Uncertainties is designed with its 2 distinct phases and its orientation towards operations definitely also leans toward action.
In fact, Lynda’s clients benefit from both world: the world of planning oriented towards actions and the world of creativity and collective intelligence brought by LS.
Our Guest and Guest Author
Lynda Frost, J.D., Ph.D. Lynda has lived and worked on four continents, but calls Austin TX home since 2003. She’s committed to helping foundations, nonprofits and other agencies maximize their impact in improving health, human services, education and criminal justice outcomes for the most vulnerable communities. She’s passionate about fair and effective process, with expertise in facilitating groups to maximize the engagement of each participant to apply what we know to make positive change on the ground. (https://www.linkedin.com/in/lyndaefrost/ )
Philip Clark: After running his company -a digital design firm – for 10 years, and the innovation department of Orange Business Services, Philip now teaches innovation and change at the university of Applied Science in Lausanne Switzerland. He also facilitates organizational transformation with a special emphasis on complexity designed tools and methods (Liberating Structures, Cynefin, Estuarine, Sensemaker…) promoting collective intelligence and distributed leadership. Contact Philip to collaborate and share ideas (https://www.linkedin.com/in/philip-evans-clark/)