Category: engagement

Rewilding Strategic Knotworking with Barry Overeem

A guest post by Philip Clark

Picture of Barry Overeem wearing glasses, blue shirt and smiling broadly.

Introduction: I am happy to share the blog space with guest author Philip Clark for the fourth in the series of his reflecting on the learnings of our little CoP on strategy knotworking. You can read his bio at the end of the post! 

“Where passion meets precision, mastery is born.” – Bruce Lee

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 answered 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 fourth installment (here is the first, here is the second, here is the third) of takeaways from the various conversations that we have been fortunate to have with seasoned practitioners on Strategic Knotworking (SK). Today, the guest is Barry Overeem. 

Barry is one of the two founders of TheLiberators. The other is Christiaan Verwijs. To say they’ve been instrumental in the diffusion of LS across Europe would be an understatement. Not only are they consummate facilitators, but they’ve also produced one of the most extensive bodies of literature on Liberating Structures in Europe, built an impressive community around their work and LS, and, last but not least, created one of the sleekest, coolest pop-style brand identities. Nancy calls them “real super spreaders” and “generous,” while Keith praises Barry’s “liberating superpowers.”

Their output is prolific (articles, podcasts, visual artifacts, surveys, workshops, tools, meet-ups, posters, academic research) and what is truly remarkable about this flurry of activities is that most of it is absolutely FREE for anyone who cares to look, think and be curious about LS in general and its interaction with Scrum in particular. 

Barry discovered LS in 2018 starting a lifelong affair. From then on he says, “I used Liberating Structures for my training, workshops, and meetups. More importantly, I also use it for regular day-to-day conversations and meetings.” For Barry, the ultimate value of LS is to make things actionable. They are fast, easy to use, and provide the right balance between structure and creativity.

Barry’s interview offers a wealth of insights. You can listen to the recording here : https://fathom.video/share/5Q6Fb58cc5djdrzkr_-vdPJNdqCKeKKG

Here are 3 takeaways:

  • Strategic execution will be improved if you think of strategy as a narrative
  • SK is amenable to many usages
  • SK welcomes process innovation and new tools

Strategic execution will be improved if you think of strategy as a narrative 

Execution is the Achilles’ heel of strategic knowledge. The critical question is: how do we ensure insights from workshops translate into lasting, sticky outcomes?”

The traditional solution is action plans. But the truth is, they rarely work as intended. When treated as the ultimate path to implementation, they often prove unsustainable, leading to defunding, abandonment, or waste. Is there a better alternative? More precisely, a more sustainable, antifragile, and “sticky” way to ensure that the insights and foresights gained in SK actually take hold?

Barry believes that the true power of SK doesn’t lie merely in drawing up a plan—or in sense-making terms, sensing, ordering, and acting—but in crafting a compelling narrative. Even the most streamlined action plan cannot, on its own, guarantee the successful delivery of strategy. A shared storyline that people can own and engage with, however, can.

Barry emphasizes that when a narrative is clear, inspiring, and meaningful, people are far more likely to act on its outcomes. To help teams develop their strategic narrative, he employs visual tools like posters and whiteboards and encourages them to continually revisit key questions, ensuring the narrative evolves and remains relevant.

SK is amenable to many usages 

SK is, first and foremost, a strategic tool—a framework designed for crafting strategy. However, the Liberators uncovered another powerful application: using it as a platform to teach and train people in LS.

Once upon a time, TheLiberators were well known throughout the LS community for their LS Immersion Workshop (Barry recently announced that he’ll no longer be offering this workshop to the public), where large groups of participants were invited to discover, explore, and experiment with roughly 20 LS from the original repertoire. The 2-day workshop was an immediate hit drawing large crowds and sparking numerous vocations. Yet, this approach left a significant portion of LS unexplored.

It soon became clear that a sequel was needed for participants to fully integrate LS into their toolbox. In response, The Liberators introduced a second, more advanced—though Barry dislikes the term—workshop, designed to deepen participants’ fluency by exploring and testing more complex LS, such as Panarchy, What I Need From You (WINFY), and Drawing Together. And the perfect vehicle for this next step? SK—providing a clear framework to guide and elevate the entire journey.

In complexity, the only certainty is that every action brings unintended consequences. Such was the case when Barry found himself facilitating an “advanced” workshop for the Dutch Ministry of Defence, intended to build on their existing knowledge and skills in LS. However, an hour into the session, the participants found the framework so powerful and compelling that they decided to test it as a strategic tool on their own organization—completely shifting focus from the original purpose. And so, SK, which had evolved from a strategy tool into a support for training, came full circle—once again being used to shape strategy.

SK welcomes process innovation and new tools   

SK follows a certain sequence, and Barry has experimented with different combinations, but he typically ends up with Purpose, Baseline, Context, Challenges, Ambition, and finally Action and Evaluation. To him, this progression seems both logical and helpful in keeping groups focused on the realities of their current situation. 

This reason is straightforward: it helps participants enter the strategic process—often daunting—through something familiar. Another way to say this, Barry suggests, is to look at SK through the lens of W3 (What? So what? Now what?). From this perspective, Baseline represents the ‘what’—the concrete reality of one’s work. From there, participants explore the ‘so what’ by assessing context and challenges, leading to the ‘now what’ as ambitions and actions take shape.

But the true shift brought by The Liberators is cognitive.

Their mission statement (“to unleash teams all over the world from outdated, old-fashioned, and ineffective ways of working through an evidence-based approach.”) focuses on an “evidence-based approach”, moving away from subjective assumptions towards data-driven analysis. This approach is built on Christiaan’s research (https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3571849 )at Aalborg University with Daniel Russo, which pinpoints the key factors that affect team performance. The result is Columinity—a tool that gives teams a clear picture of their strengths and weaknesses and how to address them. Teams can compare their results either with other teams in their organization (if multiple teams are involved) or against a broader benchmark from the entire study. (A good place to start learning about Columinity is here: https://medium.com/the-liberators/study-the-underlying-research-of-columinity-and-set-a-solid-foundation-to-get-started-d44dc168fce4 )

Readers of earlier blogs may recall that Lynda suggested examining context through the lens of comparative advantages rather than external triggers for change. Both Lynda’s and Barry’s value proposition could be summed up as follows: grounding your inquiry in existing capabilities clarifies options and prioritizes execution.

There is much to explore about Columinity and its integration with SK, particularly its impact on the remaining steps of the strategic process. But that’s a discussion for another time.

Conclusion

Reflecting on SK as a process, two key insights from TheLiberators stand out: its interpretation as a narrative and its potential for adaptability

The first lesson is to view SK not only as a process, but as a narrative. This was, and to a large extent still is, new to me. However, I’ve come to realize that thinking of strategy this way is incredibly useful—not only to make sense of our reality (as humans, we are natural storytellers) but also to enhance the flexibility of strategy. Narratives give skin to the bones of process, or, to put it differently, they add feeling and emotion to logic.

The second lesson is how SK is exceptionally adaptable. We also saw this inclination toward accommodation with Lynda and Michele. Lynda not only redefined the question of context but also integrated frameworks and tools from other approaches to strengthen execution. Michele introduced an alternative way of exploring context through the history of organizations. As for Barry, not only did he tweak the sequence of SK’s steps to secure stronger participant buy-in, but he also introduced a completely new tool —reshaping the very definition of Baseline.

Finally, looking at the way TheLiberators work, I’m struck by how deeply aligned they are with the spirit of LS. As far as I know, the scope and depth of their work with LS is unmatched in Europe— and freely available to anyone interested. It’s a treasure trove of insights, ready to be explored and learned from. I encourage everyone to take advantage of it.

Strategy isn’t within everyone’s reach—it’s often reserved for a select few somewhere between heaven and earth. But SK’s modularity makes it accessible at any level of your organization. A sense of strategy—call it a direction of travel if you prefer—is valuable no matter who you are or what you do. And SK puts it within everyone’s grasp. You don’t have to follow the whole process—use what you need, when you need it. In doing so, you’ll not only gain a deeper understanding of your activities but also develop the skills to facilitate many LS.

Our Guest Author 

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/)

Rewilding Strategic Knotworking with Lynda Frost

A guest post by my friend and colleague, Philip Clark (bios at end of post for Philip and Lynda!)

Image of Lynda Frost

“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: 

  1. The importance of preparation (sponsorship, leadership, planning team, and the use of LS) 
  2. The centrality of Purpose and its extension to mission and values
  3. 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/)  

Perfection as Control

I was reading the spectacular, “When Women Were Birds: Fifty-four Variations on Voice” by Terry Tempest Williams and this quote jumped out at me.

A rendition of a robin made out of metal and old buttons

 “Perfection is a flaw disguised as control.”

Terry Tempest Williams

I’ve been working on a writing project with Keith McCandless around Liberating Structures and time and time again we reflect on how control shows up. Perfection is one of the ways. When trying to work with emergent ideas, this is a huge, wet blanket.

Image of a rock outcropping into a bay with oystercatcher birds landing

Opening Space to Remember Harrison Owen

Picture at right of Harrison Owen on a boat, top left image of his white colored house in Camden Maine, lower left Harrison in a circle with fire and port of Camden. Picture via the OSList

Open Space Technology and the amazing people who stewarded it in the world were and are some of my most important teachers. One of them was the person who birthed OST, Harrison Owen, who passed away earlier this month into the largest Open Space ever. There will be an online OS to celebrate and remember Harrison. Here are the details, shared with encouragement to share widely.

Honoring Harrison Owen ~ A community comes together

“Camden by the Sea, Virtually and Globally”

April 8th is when it starts… 10AM Eastern USE Time/7am Pacific US Time

Place and Space: on ZOOM

https://us06web.zoom.us/j/5694939869?pwd=YUY3Q3puekZ5THljNjFoU2dCTjNuQT09

Greetings!

It is time for us to gather and to honor Harrison Owen; to share stories and to express our love for him and each other.

Two weeks have gone by since he died on March 16th, 2024.

Such sadness and grief we have all felt and are still feeling.

The expressions of love and gratitude from around the world for Harrison have been overflowing; the stories of Open Space moving and inspirational. In planning this upcoming virtual gathering, Barry Owen carried the Open Space torch for his dad. Trusting we should leave the space open, not rushing too fast in setting a time and place for us all to meet. It’s how it is when we sit in a giant circle, with lots of space in the middle, writing and announcing our topics. It’s what people have done, head and heart, with such passion and emotion. 

Barry also reminded us in the planning: “to not work too hard”.  It’s what dad would have wanted, he said.

So, he, I and others, have waited until NOW, until the right time to invite everyone. Day by day, the pieces for this future reunion came together.

Why not create a Virtual Gathering that has the spirit of Camden by the Sea? Back then, Harrison would simply rent a space, tell people where and when, and that was it. The stories from those days live on, beautiful memories of Camden Maine, the place that Harrison called home to the very end.

We then called Lucas Cioffi at QiqoChat. Can you help us? We wanted to take a minimalist approach. As always, Lucas was quick to support our ideas.

Together we imagined the Law of Two Feet in action with multiple Zoom breakout areas for conversations and blank spaces to write notes and post pictures. Nothing more. No formal facilitation or hosting, just us, welcoming each other together, holding, and opening more and more space. Trusting this beautiful process of Open Space that is so much more.

Harrison’s presence would be felt, as our official facilitator. After all, he’s already opened the space for us and is holding it still while napping along the way.  

The date of the gathering came to us in a flash. Why not April 8th to get this started, on the day of the Solar Eclipse. There seemed to be such significance to that date, as if a cosmic inspiration, the 8th day of the 4th month of 2024. Harrison at age 88 being the pure expression of an infinity symbol. And indeed engaging 8 billion people in meaningful conversations is a timeless endeavor.

We also decided that there would only be a start time (10 AM, Eastern Time), no end time, again in the spirit of Open Space “when it’s over it’s over” which implies that life in Open Space will never be over.

The intent is that people from around the globe will flow in and out, on their own time zones for a day or two or more. As for every closing circle, it will be over when it’s over.

Everyone is invited: Harrison’s family and friends, our global Open Space community and so many other colleagues and friends from around the world.

Please help us spread the word ~ everywhere, anywhere and in any way.

With love,
Barry, Suzanne, Lucas, and many others 

This…

The implications of our online lives as been in my mind since I first sat in awe of my first online community, Electric Minds. Over the years I have seen great good, but even greater swaths of harm. I’ve never thought it was all about the technology. Nor have I experienced technology as some neutral platform upon which we act. Technology is NOT value neutral. And everything that is wrong cannot be blamed on technology. Today a piece by the brilliant danah boyd nailed it. (And read the whole thing. It is superb. It leaves us with the question, why aren’t we centering children in every aspect of our ecosystem. Tech is not the solution.)

view of Nancy's grandchildren from behind on a sunny spring day

The problem is not: “Technology causes harm.” The problem is: “We live in an unhealthy society where our most vulnerable populations are suffering because we don’t invest in resilience or build social safety nets.”

danah boyd

One more snippet…

By all means, go after big tech. Regulate advertising. Create data privacy laws. Hold tech accountable for its failure to be interoperable. But for the love of the next generation, don’t pretend that it’s going to help vulnerable youth. And when the problem is sociotechnical in nature, don’t expect corporations to be able to solve it.

danah boyd