Introduction: I am happy to share the blog space with guest author Philip Clark along with Michelle Laurie sharing some of the learnings of our little CoP on strategy knotworking. You can read their bios at the end of the post! 

From Philip: Special thanks to Nancy, Lynda, Fisher, Michelle, Barry, Susan

Within the larger Liberating Structures network there is a community of practice devoted to the development and understanding of Strategy Knotworking, a set of six questions, often answered using various Liberating Structures, that lends itself to complex contexts and where there is a desire to engage everyone in planning. 

Late in 2023 we started doing a series of Users Experience Fishbowls with seasoned practitioners to hear their stories, learn from them and share their experience with our community at large. So far, we have had the pleasure to talk to Lynda Frost, Fisher Qua, Michelle Laurie, and Barry Overeem. We also had the chance to listen in on a presentation Keith McCandless did of a knotworking case of his own. It started a few months back when Keith went on a tour of LS communities presenting a case study about Strategy Knotworking (SK).

The amount of wisdom, heuristics, different usages and details provided by our guests is substantial and will take some time to digest. All our sessions are recorded, all have transcripts. You can access these materials via our # Knotworking group on Slack (leave a comment with your email below and Nancy will invite you) and our GoogleDrive folder (https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1573AmVQpJhQW20UgbTqLvwVfiHIhUNfp)  

One of the sessions that resonated with me was Michelle Laurie’s. Here are a few nuggets I have found particularly enlightening.

Michelle’s work takes place in particularly complex environments where her clients can include communities, local and regional governments, non-profit organizations, etc… The specificity here is that multiple players have multiple objectives.  There are also trust issues. Building trust is an important foundation to collaborative planning and, for Michelle, you won’t be surprised to discover, strategic in nature. More of this in a minute. 

About strategy

Michelle described three different cases. One thing they had in common is that you rarely start with a blank page. In other words, some strategic elements can be relatively stable over time which implies that the past is as important as the future.  

Another thing common to all three was the importance of preparation. All of them needed lot’s of it. The more you prepare, the easier and nimble the delivery (especially if you need to adapt quickly). The trick is to have it done by the client as much as possible. 

Knotworking offers a structure through the use of six questions: 1) What is the purpose of our work? 2) What is happening around us that demands change. 3) What challenges and wicked questions must we face to achieve our purpose? 4) Where are we starting, honestly? 5) Based on what we have just learned, what is now made possible? 6) What are we going to do, what are the next steps and how will we know we are making progress? (Yes, that is actually three questions. Smiley face.)

In Michelle’s work with a hospital the planning team was small, aligned, and had their projects placed “in neat tidy buckets” prior to the strategic workshop. In other words, they were clear about their strategic initiatives and needed a way to prioritize them. The novelty here was both the strategic process itself and their first experience with digital tools (as a consequence of the pandemic). Given both the cohesiveness of the team and the work previously done, the strategic process went smoothly. The team did not have a purpose, so they started with that. 

They then addressed context and challenges by answering  the prompt “What do we need to be aware of when considering strategies / actions for the year ahead?” That readied them to analyze the pre-prepared set electronic stickies to assess the current projects and activities for current baseline state. Actions were determined by a voting process according to the following options : must do, love to do, like to do, not really interested. In this example, although the projects and the criteria for evaluation had been discussed prior to the SK workshop, the team gained clarity reflecting together on purpose, context, challenges, and baseline. 

The strategic process was fairly rapid and summative. The benefit was to reinforce coherence, provide details and range of possible work of the various projects as well as enrich the connection between the members of the team. All things considered : clean, fast, enjoyable.

About trust

Michelle remarks that when you have to deal with large partnerships, trust is a critical issue. The fact that these teams or people have few interactions and identify with different constituencies reinforces their insularity. It makes it difficult to grasp and elaborate something that could be called, after Dan Simmon’s “Hyperion”, the space that binds, a space where new things, new thoughts, new actions can emerge in a manner that matters to all the constituents. That space is strategy.

If trust is lacking it must be built. This means flexibility with the process. The great skill here is letting go. Before strategizing, before talking about purpose, context, etc … seek what Stuart Kaufmann calls “the adjacent possible.” Look for that which is within reach, not necessarily what we want or desire. So the pattern seems to be “go with the flow”;  go where there is readiness, eagerness, curiosity and energy. Sometimes it is just the act of talking with each other that matters. Be ready to leave the plan aside, to put the process on hold, and just let it roll, like they say in the movies when they start shooting. It is hard for those of us who believe in the goodness of a structured process, or in the generative power of a well-constructed narrative, but sometimes you’ll have to let go.

In terms of strategy, Michelle discovered that trust is not just between the project stakeholders, but also between stakeholders and the community. The importance of connectedness and leadership in the community created indirectly helps project partners’ work succeed. Within the project partnership, shared visible artifacts are needed: as Michelle says “something written and seen that allows people to see where everyone’s at, (something) you can take (…) back to your organization. Something you can come back to, (…) to ground you”. The document is the output but the discussions, relationship building and sensemaking to get the document are the true outcomes. Panarchy or Ecocycle Planning are natural candidates to support the process.

With this in mind, Michelle was able to introduce a new strategic direction called « Integration and Building understanding » as a process made to avoid the trap of falling back into silos once the workshop ended. This also implied that the strategic plan was going to include actions that addressed this new strategic direction.

Reflections on the 6 phases of SK

1. “Purpose” is important albeit not always sought after. If you are like Michelle, Lynda, Fisher, Barry you’ll push for it. 

2. In one situation, “Context” was expressed not by answering the classical prompt of “what is happening around you that demands change?” but by tapping into the narratives about the organisation’s history. When you are lucky to still have people who have been a long time in the organisation together with many layers of new people, and that what had been good and specific to the culture of the organisation vanished, devoting time recalling how things were can be a remarkable way to look at the present and a nice trampoline for the future. 

3. “Challenges” can be different things to different people. Michelle has a nice way to describe them when she says that “they are anything (my underlining) that people or team need to be talked about to help the strategic plan or the group work better together.” For example, challenges could take the form of a retrospective about a project in progress.

4. “Baseline” refers to the current situation. There are many ways to describe it and Michelle uses Ecocycle Planning extensively as the best way to map a variety of things (activities, states, projects, etc…) dynamically.

5. “Ambitions” were not clear for Michelle. It looked to her like the transition from Baseline to Ambition and Action and Evaluation was not as straightforward as that. Nancy jumped in and clarified this step. Ambition is based on everything that was discovered in questions 1 through 4. It is about having conversations that could start with “what if?,” conversations about what to trade off, about what matters now or even what is the most important thing we want to do together. It is more of a generative exercise, versus a planning approach which is the 6th question.

6. Three things about “Action and Evaluation.” One, this is where everyone wants to be. Two, because usually much time is devoted to the previous phases of the SK process, this stage can often be hurried. Not a good idea. Three, because strategy is led by decision-makers, and this step is about execution, it is important to have the right people in the room, those good at operations and to make sure the baton is smoothly passed.

A common tendency while doing strategy is to want  to jump immediately to the planning phase. To answer the question, what are we going to do? Will we do this, or do that? Look into this, or study that? This bias toward action tends to take a lot of strategic elements like purpose, context, challenges, even the current state for granted. It minimizes or triggers forms of restlessness with other critical aspects of strategy such as the quality and the role of relations or a finer and more appropriate awareness of the situation. Hence the wicked question: “how can we address the need for action while developing rich and meaningful connections.  

If you want to join our little Slack community, leave a comment for Nancy below.

Our Guest Author Team

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/)  

Michelle Laurie: For more than twenty years Michelle Laurie has worked with leading agencies around the world to achieve their sustainability goals. She facilitates multi-stakeholder dialogue, strategic design of networks and partnerships, and supports projects related to global change, health and the environment. She is a big proponent of participatory process, collaboration and engagement. She began experimenting with Strategy Knotworking in 2019 and continues to do so whenever the opportunity arises. Contact Michelle to collaborate and share ideas (feel free to link my site michellelaurie.com and/ or LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/michellelaurie/).

If you are interested in Strategic Knotworking, leave a message for Nancy with your email and she will send an invite!