Category: Liberating Structures

Leadership and Trust

So many years ago there was this great blog, Weknowmore.org run by Antoon van het Erve and Johan Lammers. (Hey, both of you are also KM4Dev members. Johan, here is your KM4Dev bio! Remember this post?). The post is now digital dust. I had copied it back in 2009 with the intention of blogging about it. I could not find the particular post on the Wayback Internet Archive, but I was able to find one page for a screen grab.

Screen capture of the weknowmore.org front page from the Internet Wayback Machine showing a crowd of people and links to what the company did and their blog posts.

The post was titled: “Ten ways how leadership can influence and promote interpersonal trust in knowledge management behavior and processes.” 

As I read them, they resonated with the 10 leadership principles that emerged from Liberating Structures. They are not the same, but they are related. Take a look and see if there is something resonant and useful for you. I’ve put a few notes in bold dark red.

From WeKnowMore.org

Trustworthy Behaviors

1. Act with discretion Keeping a secret means not exposing another person’s vulnerability; thus, divulging a confidence makes a person seem malevolent and/or unprofessional.

  • Be clear about what information you are expected to keep confidential.
  • Don’t reveal information you have said you would not . . . and hold others accountable for this.

In the digital era, this becomes a gnarly intersection with both transparency, and organizational policies and practices. Secrets are rare things these days. 

2. Be consistent between word and deed When people do not say one thing and do another, they are perceived as both caring about others (i.e., they do not mislead) and as being competent enough to follow through.

  • Be clear about what you have committed to do, so there is no misunderstanding.
  • Set realistic expectations when committing to do something, and then deliver.

In complex, uncertain times, there is the layer of working with uncertainty and ambiguity when setting expectations!

3. Ensure frequent and rich communication Frequent, close interactions typically lead to positive feelings of caring about each other and better understandings of each other’s expertise.

  • Make interactions meaningful and memorable.
  • Consider having some face-to-face (or at least telephone) contact.
  • Develop close relationships.

In our remote/hybrid/F2F continuum, we have to reexamine these practices. What worked in the “good old days” pre-pandemic may no longer be relevant. This is a place for creative destruction not only for communications practices, but understanding the value of them – not just doing them because we always did them!

4. Engage in collaborative communication People are more willing to trust someone who shows a willingness to listen and share; i.e., to get involved and talk things through. In contrast, people are wary of someone who seems closed and will only answer clear-cut questions or discuss complete solutions.

  • Avoid being overly critical or judgmental of ideas still in their infancy.
  • Don’t always demand complete solutions from people trying to solve a problem.
  • Be willing to work with people to improve jointly on their partially formed ideas.

Ditto to #3!

5. Ensure that decisions are fair and transparent People take their cues from the larger environment. As a result, there is a “trickle down” effect for trust, where the way management treats people leads to a situation where employees treat one another similarly. Thus, fair and transparent decisions on personnel matters translate into a more trusting environment among everyone.

  • Make sure that people know how and why personnel rules are applied and that the rules are applied equally.
  • Make promotion and rewards criteria clear-cut, so people don’t waste time developing a hidden agenda (or trying to decode everyone else’s).

See #1. I also think we have to rethink the value and application of rules, heuristics and practices in complex contexts where rules are not useful!

Organizational Factors

6. Establish and ensure shared vision and language People who have similar goals and who think alike find it easier to form a closer bond and to understand one another’s communications and expertise.

  • Set common goals early on.
  • Look for opportunities to create common terminology and ways of thinking.
  • Be on the lookout for misunderstandings due to differences in jargon or thought processes.

Reframe to purpose, which can be tracked or measured, even if the indicators are less-than-perfect. The rest is still spot on. But “vision” is too vague these days.  It leads to the very misunderstandings noted above.

7. Hold people accountable for trust To make trustworthy behavior become “how we do things here,” managers need to measure and reward it. Even if the measures are subjective, evaluating people’s trustworthiness sends a strong signal to everyone that trust is critical.

  • Explicitly include measures of trustworthiness in performance evaluations.
  • Resist the urge to reward high performers who are not trustworthy.
  • Keep publicizing key values such as trust-highlighting both rewarded good examples and punished violations-in multiple forums.

What is the line or continuum of measuring trust and measuring performance, progress, etc.?  How do we succeed in lower trust environments while trust is forming or absent but we still work together. This gets to the nubbins of trust itself and how essential it is. I think this is super context dependent. But I’ll save that for another day. This is getting LONG!

Relational Factors

8. Create personal connections. When two people share information about their personal lives, especially about similarities, then a stronger bond and greater trust develop. Non-work connections make a person seem more “real” and human, and thus more trustworthy.

  • Create a “human connection” with someone based on non-work things you have in common.
  • Maintain a quality connection when you do occasionally run into acquaintances, including discussing non-work topics.
  • Don’t divulge personal information shared in confidence.

Still resonates with my “if we get to know each other, even a little bit, we are less likely to shoot each other…

9. Give away something of value Giving trust and good faith to someone makes that person want to be trusting, loyal, and generous in return.

  • When appropriate, take risks in sharing your expertise with people.
  • Be willing to offer others your personal network of contacts when appropriate.

Love this one. The most.

Individual Factors

10. Disclose your expertise and limitations Being candid about your limitations gives people confidence that they can trust what you say are your strengths. If you claim to know everything, then no one is sure when to believe you.

  • Make clear both what you do and don’t know.
  • Admit it when you don’t know something rather than posture to avoid embarrassment.
  • Defer to people who know more than you do about a topic.

Well, maybe I love THIS one the most. 🙂

Liberating Structures Principles

As I revisited the principles and cross checked them to the things above, my sense was the principles support the practices noted above. Your thoughts? The comments are OPEN!

  1. Include and Unleash Everyone
  2. Practice Deep Respect for People and Local Solutions
  3. Build Trust As You Go
  4. Learn by Failing Forward
  5. Practice Self-Discovery Within a Group
  6. Amplify Freedom AND Responsibility
  7. Emphasize Possibilities: Believe Before You See
  8. Invite Creative Destruction To Enable Innovation
  9. Engage In Seriously-Playful Curiosity
  10. Never Start Without Clear Purpose

NASA’s Salish Sea in the Snow

I’ve been absent from my blog catch up due to flooding basements and such things. Ah, good intentions.

Today I was led to a stunning photo by NASA of the Salish Sea region – where I spend my time – in the snow. Click in to look at it with more detail. It made me think of you, dear readers (all seven of you!)

We had record breaking cold and snow the last week in December. Seeing it from space was one of those “if I could only look from a new perspective” moments. We need those moments to question what we are doing and want to do. And to just sit in awe of nature.

Speaking of questioning things, Alexandra Samuel‘s remote work newsletter came out today with great reframing questions to consider not just about the return to F2F work, but the very nature of work. It made me want to convene a Strategic Knotworking Session (draft structure description in process to formalize this Liberating Structure here) about work! Worth a read!

Now, back to cleaning up the basement!

Patrick Lambe on Against Bestness

Photograph of yellow warning signsthat says "water over roadway" and "dead end" surrounded by flood waters. Clouds and trees reflected on the water.


In 2008 Patrick Lambe wrote this fabulous blog post challenging our notion of, or perhaps obsession with, bestness. Green Chameleon » Against Bestness

First, I encourage you to read the whole post. It is still spot on resonant. Patrick highlights many of the missteps of trying to focus on all things best: best practices, simplistic taxonomies, etc.

Why do we fall for bestness? For me, it is our own entrained thinking and simply not paying attention to the signals where a focus on best is, at best (haha) is a wrong turn.

Second, I’d love you to share the signals you notice when you (if you ever do) start focusing on bestness instead of the right thing to do right now. (Or some variation.)

In taking a step back from constant work, I’m reflecting on some of my choices with groups and clients and see moments where I have consciously or unconsciously not heard what others offer because I thought I had what was best.  Signals? Defensiveness. Interrupting others. Prioritizing the voices that agreed with me.

My antidote? Stick with structures that prevent behavior that I succumbed to now and again. This is probably why I use Liberating Structures, or at the least, consider my process choices based on how much the bring all voices to the work.

Tom Haskins on our Inner Teacher

In 2008 this blog post, growing changing learning creating: Relying on inner teachers, from Tom Haskin’s caught my eye enough to cause me to save the URL in a draft post. Revisiting it today, it still has resonance, but far beyond the classroom teaching context of the post itself. Please, after scanning the snippet below, go read the full post. Substitute what ever domain is yours for Tom’s as a classroom teacher.

Dawn on Skagit Bay, with Ika Island in the foreground and reflections on the tidal flatlands.

While blogging for the past year on related topics, I’ve come to the following realizations about the nature of a compounding solution in education:

  1. When we assume each student has an inner teacher within their minds, we will stop interfering with the discovery, cultivation and trust building with that inner teacher. The inner teacher will come to the fore of the students learning experiences and and reconfigure how they picture learning occurring. Problems with a particular learning challenge or patterns of learning efforts will get worked out between the student and the inner teacher who already knows what the underlying problems are.

As I read Tom’s words they resonate for me as a practitioner of Liberating Structures and more generally as a process person who deeply values learning, reflection and action. How do Tom’s words resonate for you?

Thanks, Tom!

(I’m having fun going through the detritus of draft blog posts!)

Uncertainty/Agreement Matrix

I have started going through the 419 draft blog posts sitting in my WordPress dashboard. Some are simply links of things I found interesting, and alas, many of those links (2006, 2015) are now dead and those drafts are deleted. There are a few nuggets.

I came upon this little doodle that emerged from/by people at the 2008 gathering of process practitioners, Nexus for Change. (Nexus continues to grow and thrive focusing on the domain of whole systems change. There are three videos which try and tell the story of its evolution.)

The image is of an agreement/certainty matrix based on the work of Ralph Stacey. I continue to use it as part of my Liberating Structures repertoire and it has infused and informed many other process approaches.

What attracted me to resurrect this image and post it is that there is still such resonance for me today. Much of my work of the past five years has been in this area of low certainty and low agreement – the stuff in the upper right hand side of the image. And of course the invitation into each piece of work has often been in the lower left – clients thinking they were working in higher agreement and certainty, only to discover they were not.

This shift of understanding where we place and understand our work (play, relationships, etc.) is both liberating, daunting and, sometimes, frustrating. It calls upon different skills and expertise. The lessons of the COVID era illustrate this. Just when we think we understand what is happening and how we might respond, things change. We have to find that space between “just do something useful today ” and live with the uncertainty and “unknowing.”

Photo of a hand drawing of an Agreement-Certainty matrix in various colors of pen.

From the Principles Chart on Flickr – Photo Sharing!

At the same time, this does not mean we ignore the lower left. There are things we can do with some amount of certainty. One that seems to have been somewhat abandoned is the choice to care about every person around us, and to act with kindness. Our uncertainty seems to have nudged many of us (USA I’m looking at you) towards self-preservation, or even outright selfishness, as if we deserve something. In uncertainty, all bets are off, including our past sense of entitlement.

What does this image tell me today? Keep ahold of the principles of our best selves and practice them together, with certainty and agreement. And let go of things that prevent us from seeing and experimenting with possibility in the areas of high uncertainty and disagreement. A classic wicked question and filled with potential dissonance. And possibility.

Part of a larger photo set from Nexus for Change in 2008 https://www.flickr.com/photos/choconancy/albums/72157604309184882