Hey friends, at least the seven of you who still read here – wink wink. I’m working on some writing about doing Liberating Structures online and one section which needs inspiration is a short section on hybrid gatherings. I last wrote about hybrids in 2013 so it has been a while. I’d love any of your favorite pointers. THANKS IN ADVANCE!
UPDATE: Please read the fab comments from my friends below. There is actual useful insight but it is in the comments!!!
In my childhood, my mother, Dolores Wright, got a fudge recipe from her friend Nadine Seedall. Nadine said it was the recipe from See’s Candy – then a small local chocolate company in California. It has been made year over year as a family tradition. Some years, multiple batches were made so packages and tins of fudge were given to EVERYONE. Now we make one batch – some to give, some to eat together. Today my grandpeople and I will make this year’s batch, passing the tradition down. The fourth generation in my lifetime so far…
I’ve blogged the recipe multiple times (see here) and offer it as a sweet bit of gratitude to all of you. Happy Holidays!
When people ask what I’m up to work-wise, I vaguely mention my “rewirement.” I’ve been in the process of redesigning my “working” life into a more consciously designed life flow. In other words, I’m doing less “paid work,” and devoting more time, attention and prioritization of family, my own learning, playing my guitar and spending time in my garden.
What does this mean if you want to hire me? I’m only taking on 1-2 clients at a time. I’m done juggling many work balls, now reveling in a more spacious life. And I have three criteria for saying “yes.”
If you and your work resonate with this, let’s talk.
A group of my LS pals gathered online this week to ponder the role of AI in our Liberating Structures (LS) practices. It was sparked by an experiment by a professor (For details, look here) to design a student experience using LS. The gist was, can AI (in this case, ChatGPT) help us design the gatherings we are creating. In LS parlance, this would be to suggest a “string,” a series of LS.) Can AI coach us to make the widespread use of LS across many (all?) contexts. Will this make it easy and enable less experienced users to successfully use LS? In other words, can AI be my LS coach? Keith McCandless wrote up his thoughts here.
Liberating Structures, for those new to my blog, are simple structures to unleash and engage participants. Read more here. They have become central to my practice, so yes, I obsess about them. A lot!
My experience teaching and coaching LS is that onboarding and use of 30-60% of the structures is pretty darn easy, painless and can be done by following the instructions, or by a direct experience of a structure led by someone else. Then you can dive in. I think AI would be icing on the cake for basic application IF one knew useful prompts for the LLM (Large Language Model – the thing that sits underneath tools like ChatGPT. And perhaps the cake is rich enough to be eaten plain.
But is there something more? I wanted to begin to explore HOW we might use AI and develop some min specs of WHEN we would benefit from using AI. Of course, with a little side dish of the risks and rewards.
The next level of LS practice is stringing structures into a coherent flow of a meeting or gathering agenda and being ready to switch to different LS as things emerge. This ability to work in complex and emergent contexts is a key value of LS so learning how to do that seems useful.
This level of practice starts with some of the basics of good meeting practices, mainly having a PURPOSE to start with. Without a clear purpose, or at least full awareness of that lack of clarity, we can fall into the trap of doing a structure to just, well, DO a structure. In experimenting with ChatGPT, I could give it a simple purpose and it would generate a fairly basic structure. In the limited number of trials I did, the AI gave me a pretty stable set of structures that I would consider the “easier to learn” type. So this type of suggestion might be inspiration for a new practitioner or give some sense of confidence. Most folks don’t need much more coaching for this level of application. It may also lead to MISSING out on other, less mentioned structures. My few experiments did not provide much opportunity for leveling up.
On the downside, vague prompts produce vague and sometimes downright awful results. So being skilled at prompts, or having access to a library of fairly basic prompts that can be customized by context seems essential.
Next we have a still limited LS related dataset in the current versions of tools like ChatGPT. Yes, we expect this to evolve and improve. But reliability is an issue. What happens when bad examples and data populates the corpus of data? What are the risks of “bad” advice (bias, baseline data, response to poorly worded prompts)?
When you circle back to get sources to the suggestions offered by ChatGPT, you can get garbage. I was offered imaginary papers by people I knew. I asked them, “did you write this paper?” No, they didn’t. We need our crap detectors!
For transcripts of some of my experiments see here and here, a ChatGPT composed musical (yeah, not related), and an attempt at a prompt template Keith McCandless and I were playing with.
If one had access to this AI coach, would it increase the adoption of LS? I can imagine a world where it could increase adoption if there were some sort of front end that could help users develop useful prompts, point them to supplemental/complementary resources and hook them up with other practitioners. For simple stringing, once we have a good database, it could be really handy.
I do not have enough imagination to figure out how I would measure this. My experience and intuition tell me that some people would find this an ideal way of learning and using LS. They just want to get a good result from their meeting and aren’t looking to be deep LS practitioners. Or at least, not yet. (It can suck you in!) So I can imagine this is a useful area of exploration.
The downside of learning LS via an AI may not be much more than the downside of “read and run” any particular LS. You might get ok, good, or even better results on your own. But I’d bet some good chocolate that the range of results would trend towards better if one practiced LS with other LS practitioners. It’s good social learning practice!
That said, I think there are some specific risks. For example:
OK, your turn. What have you experimented with in terms of LS and AI? Your thoughts, ideas and suggestions?
I hung out yesterday with Keith McCandless, Stefan Morales and his team along with a cohort of new Liberating Structures (LS) users. The highlight of our hour together was the New Users Fishbowl, where we heard about the good, the bad, the ugly and the lovely of three folks using their new LS learning. One person, working in the the jungles of Costa Rica, had never facilitated. This was her first facilitation training! She just grabbed on to a handful of structures, crafted her agenda or “string,” and successfully led her meeting. And got results! Just do it! Just PRACTICE! (Oh, I would love to share the video of her telling the story. Maybe that can happen! Maybe I can follow up and interview her!)
Yes, and…
When I shared my GOOD and LOVELY of LS, I spoke about the social container, the community, that holds the LS practice as it is used and evolves. I’m committed to the idea that using LS happens in the context of social learning, in social learning spaces; learning with and from each other, and making sense as we practice together. (Side note: See Bev and Etienne Wenger-Trayner et. al.’s new Communities of Practice Guidebook. )
Keith, as one of the LS co-founders, is deeply committed to its spread. That commitment is reflected in the care with which he and his co-founder, Henri Lipmanowicz crafted the instructions for each structure so that anyone could read, pick it up and run with it. The idea that this is so simple and clear as expressed in writing, you are ready. I am less sanguine about that (sorry, Keith!)
For the of auto-didacts and the intrinsically or experientially confident, this works. For the rest of us, there is much that comes between the idea that “hey, this is cool and will improve our group interactions and work” and actually DOING it. Doing it in the face of being a new-bee. Doing it in the face of those who resist how LS distributes power to everyone in the room. Doing it in the (mistake) belief that if I don’t do this perfectly this will be a disaster. (A.k.a, looking foolish, or learning while failing forward!) Doing it before we have internalized our own sense of agency to use the structures. Believing before seeing.
When we try together; practice together; debrief together after practicing alone, the value of our LS work becomes visible. We hold both our “beginners mind” and our “seasoned practitioner” experience hand in hand. We benefit from the multiple perspectives of our fellow practitioners — “you did WHAT? WAAAY COOL!” In Stefan’s workshop, even the new-bee is encouraged. Again, drawing on Bev and Etienne and their book, Learning to Make a Difference, comes this idea of identity as a source of agency.
…have learned or internalized that they can’t make a difference³ or that the chances of success are so low it’s not worth trying. The risks may outweigh even the effort of imagining possible benefits. People from vulnerable social groups are often disenfranchised from resources and some have adapted their expectations to align with the status quo.” And many participants are likely to fall somewhere in between. Learning to make a difference often has to start with developing an identity from which to envision the possibility of making a difference.
Even if participants have a foundation of confidence to consider trying to make a difference, we are not assuming that this is a simple, straight- forward intention – that caring to make a difference is free of ambivalence, tensions, or contradictions. For instance, there may be a disturbing gap between what an organization expects and what participants think is important. There may also be disagreements among participants. When caring to make a difference is viewed as part of the lived experience of people, it inherits all the complexity and forces of the social world in which people are embedded. Learning to make a difference brings this complexity into focus: it includes learning to navigate external demands, contradictions, tensions, and ambivalence.
Learning to Make a Difference Etienne Wenger-Trayner and Beverly Wenger-Trayner
The spread of a Liberating Structures practice is the dance between exposure to the content and the practice using LS. It is, to use the Wenger-Trayner’s words, “developing an identity from which to envision the possibility of making a difference.”
Liberating Structures aspire to be of use to those making a difference. The container for this aspiration, for the spread of LS, of this social learning, is the community of LS practitioners. LS is great stuff. It’s practitioners are an amazing, diverse collection of co-learners. AND, LS needs it’s various social learning spaces to spread far, wide, lovingly, and successfully.