Wanderings of a Liberating Structures Practitioner – Part 1 3 Reasons

Purpose 2 PracticeAs readers of my blog may have noticed, I’ve mentioned Liberating Structures more and more over the past two years. I’ve used them extensively with clients, but I don’t often get the chance to write publicly about that work. The great folks at the Fire Adapted Communities Network gave me permission to share my process “download” with you. It prompted me to a bit of year end reflection that requires more than one post. So here we go! This is a bit of a mishmosh of work and conversations that came prior as well. Consider this first post the rationale, or reasons for my shift towards Liberating Structures. The second post will show up here. (When I get it finished!)

What my clients have been asking for a lot is something that falls into the general category of a “retreat” to examine progress, consider current conditions and plan for the future. In almost every case there has been internal or external factors that make these moments in time feel like inflection or turning points. Policy changes due to political shifts. Growth in networks. Shifting priorities. Emerging possibilities. All of these could be addressed with “traditional strategic planning.” But I have realized I don’t do this anymore. Forget your SWOT analysis. I’m fully into the “liberating planning” space.

This first pots gives an overview of genesis of what I’ve been doing comes out of some work Keith McCandless and I did at the University of Michigan immersion last Spring, conversations with Keith, Fisher and other LS pals, and all the gatherings that have come before me with my clients. (THANK YOU CLIENTS! I LOVE YOU!) Some of the key themes that keep croping up include:

A Portfolio Perspective

Very few organizations or even projects have just one element. The group/organization/person needs to take a portfolio perspective on planning which is quite different than, for example, “planning a project.”  This thinking was first introduced to me by Rachel Cardone when she was managing a portfolio of investments in the water, sanitation and hygiene area.

When you work at the portfolio level, you are looking not for a single success (or failure), but for signals that can show how to move the whole field forward. You want to do rapid “safe fail” probes and experimentation in areas of uncertainty, and then scale up more mature results. This is very consistent with the Cynefin Framework of Snowden and friends. And,among many useful things, Ecocycle Planning in Liberating Structures is an amazing porfolio oriented approach.

That said, few non profits or NGOs talk about managing their portfolios. I most often see a project and project management perspective, something that exists over a totally artificial three year grant funding cycle, that dominates the narrative. And within that narrative are the holy pair of impact and scaling up and out. Figure it out and then replicate the you-know-what out of it. So why aren’t all our problems solved? How are we relating that to strategy? That brings up the second area.

Complexity

Most of the challenges people are facing are not simple cause/effect problems. They are muliti factoral, often unpredictable which makes them complex. Now don’t get all wobbly kneed with the C word. It does NOT mean that things are SO complex, we simply can’t address the complexity. There are plenty of scholars and practitioners who have proved otherwise. And I don’t just mean to pretend a problem is simple and try to solve it that way.

The implication for my work is that people need a handle on complexity, something that allows them to recognize it, work with it, and not get overwhelmed. Think about the 2030 Sustainable Development goals.  At one level there are 17 rational appearing goals:

  1. End poverty in all its forms everywhere
  2. End hunger, achieve food security and improved nutrition, and promote sustainable agriculture
  3. Ensure healthy lives and promote well-being for all at all ages
  4. Ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote life-long learning opportunities for all
  5. Achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls
  6. Ensure availability and sustainable management of water and sanitation for all
  7. Ensure access to affordable, reliable, sustainable, and modern energy for all
  8. Promote sustained, inclusive and sustainable economic growth, full and productive employment and decent work for all
  9. Build resilient infrastructure, promote inclusive and sustainable industrialization and foster innovation
  10. Reduce inequality within and among countries
  11. Make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable
  12. Ensure sustainable consumption and production patterns
  13. Take urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts (in line with the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change)
  14. Conserve and sustainably use the oceans, seas and marine resources for sustainable development
  15. Protect, restore and promote sustainable use of terrestrial ecosystems, sustainably manage forests, combat desertification, and halt and reverse land degradation and halt biodiversity loss
  16. Promote peaceful and inclusive societies for sustainable development, provide access to justice for all and build effective, accountable and inclusive institutions at all levels
  17. Strengthen the means of implementation and revitalize the global partnership for sustainable development

Then start thinking about how these 17 are all emmeshed with each other. Dive into the links and look at the many layers of indicators and outcomes. Does your head hurt yet? (The sheer number of PDFs makes my head hurt!) Should that stop us from taking action? NOOOOOO…. If we are to tackle system level problems, we need a repertoire suited from complex contexts. Look at the work of Cognitive Edge (alas, now most of the methods are behind a paywall), Harold Jarche (and..), and many others.

The patterns I notice across these and other useful processes for working in a complex context are these:

  • they ask us to shift our perspective about how past experiences inform our present analysis,
  • they support the emergent (often unpredictable), and,
  • they are iterative.

All these ask us to practice a different mindset for planning. These approaches are also attracting REALLY INTERESTING people. That, of course, attracts me.

It’s the People

Yes, those people. If I were to admit it, it is the people, not the complexity that draws me in! Interesting people who really want to get things done are tackling these tough problems. They are passionate, open, hard working and they deserve practices that acknowledge the wisdom and intelligence of all actors (well, we all say/do some stupid things too. I do. Don’t you?) They deserve not to be tortured by boring meetings, poor process and feeble results. Work, learning, doing –> all is ready for liberation. And that includes how we plan for our work, learning, doing and yes, even serious play.

So there you have it in a messy nutshell: what drives me in my work. On to part 2 to talk about this strategic practice that has been emerging for me.

 

Happy Holidays: Free Digital Versions of Digital Habitats!

It is hard to believe we finished “Digital Habitat: Stewarding technology for communities” back in 2009. 7 years later the book is still selling on Amazon (amazing! grateful!). Etienne Wenger, John D. Smith and I wrote the book to help you support your communities. Now we have a little solstice, holiday, year end present for you.

As of December 2016, we have decided to make the full publication available FREE!  So now you have the following electronic options. (But feel free to keep buying too!)

Happy Solstice! Happy Holidays! Merry Christmas! Happy New Year!

Liberating Structures in Higher Ed: Vancouver 2017

ls-promo-banner

Source: » Liberating Structures 2017 Image by Tracy Kelly

As I noted in yesterday’s post, I’m heading up to Vancouver to co-host a couple of workshops. Besides the VizEd, Tracy Kelly, a great team and I will co-host a two day Liberating Structures immersion workshop February 22-23, 2017 and the early bird rate ends November 15th. So Register Online Now!

This immersion workshop focuses on the appication of Liberating Structures in higher education. Here are the details:

Liberating Structures are a collection of powerful facilitation strategies that can be used in our classrooms, everyday meetings, strategic planning sessions, workshops, presentations, etc.  They are seriously fun methods to engage and work together.

Liberating Structures are small design shifts that move us gently away from more constraining  “conventional structures” (e.g., lectures, open discussions, round robin updates, brainstorms) and toward sessions that quickly foster lively participation in groups of any size, making it possible to unleash and include everyone. 

In the workshop, you will learn how to choose, facilitate, and sequence Liberating Structures for your individual facilitation challenges and contexts.

Who should attend?

Faculty, Instructors, Teachers,  Learning Designers, Leaders –  all who are called to facilitate learning, meetings, sessions, groups, presentations, workshops, processes, communication and change. (I would add learning in and outside of formal educational institutions!)

We will focus on post-secondary education contexts, but colleagues from other sectors (e.g., government, health care, private) are welcome!

Here are some examples of applying liberating structures:

I’m particularly excited by the early conversations with the hosting team, dancing around provocative and challenging issues such as inclusion, indiginization, how people do or don’t see themselves as “facilitators” and what this means in the Liberating Structures context. As always, we will travel both familiar and new territory! Join us!

» Graphic Practices in Higher Ed: VizEd 2017

Source: » VizEd 2017

Happy, Happy, Happy dance! I get to offer a workshop with the fabulous Tracy Kelley of BC Campus in February on visual practices in higher education. (She made the visual above which I LOVE!) AND PSST, the early bird deadline is NOVEMBER 15th. You can read all about it here. It is one of two workshops we are cooking up. The second is a Liberating Structures immersion workshop and I’ll blog about that separately as I want to share some of the planning process.

I’m particularly excited that we are focusing the practice in all sorts of higher education contexts – teaching and learning, administration, design and… well, ANYWHERE! (Yes, all caps. Yes, EXCITED!)

Here is the blurb:

Have you ever noticed that moment when people are talking about something, then they whip out a pen and start sketching? Or when a conversation breaks open because someone goes to the whiteboard and draws something?

We are beings with many senses, but we often forget how powerful it is to make meaning using words and images. There is something so negotiable about rough little sketches that invites us deeper into understanding, instead of trying to “be right” or “prove my point.” Everything becomes just a little bit more negotiable.  This is the power of creating visuals with and for each other.

Join us for a hands-on, full-on day of exploring the opportunities and practices of bringing hand made visuals into our teaching and learning. (P.S. “handmade” can mean electronic too!)

We will warm up with some exercises to banish our inner critics, then explore practices for going visual in our work. Bring your challenges! Bring your ideas!  Bring your inner learner, your inner teacher and your inner child as we explore visual practices together.

What you can expect:

  • Tips and practice for basic drawing skills (Courage! Confidence! Color!)
  • Examples of visual exercises and activities, and where they might be useful in your work in higher education
  • Explore templates for collaborative visual meaning making
  • Experiment with the intersection of group process and visuals

THERE ARE NO “ARTIST” PRE-REQUISITES!

What to bring: 

  • Bring a notebook, your phone (or other camera) to capture visuals that inform and inspire you.
  • You are unlikely to use a laptop during the workshop, but you might like to bring a tablet (and your favourite stylus if you have  one!)
  • Wear your most comfortable clothes and shoes you can get dirty (ink, chalk, etc.)

Register here.

Can we role model graphic recording? Part 3 in the series

logo_gfrasBackground: This is the third of three posts about some recent visual experiences at the  7th Annual GFRAS Meeting in Limbe, Cameroon, where I was invited as their graphic recorder! As I noted in Part 1, it is a huge investment of resources – theirs and mine – to have me there for the meeting, so I asked if I could also run a short “introduction to graphic recording” the before the event kicked off, and then we could have the participants fan out across the breakouts and field trips to capture sketch notes. The second post in the series shares a few stories and artifacts from the workshop participants about their sketchnoting at the meeting and after they returned home. How are they using their new skills? This third part shares the graphic recordings I did with a little reflection on my own process and the element of role modeling graphic recording skills – particularly the listening and synthesizing skills. 

The #GFRAS2016 Annual meeting started on a Monday afternoon, had a full day on Tuesday, field trips on Wednesday and a final day on Thursday. My graphic recording charge was a chart for Monday, Tuesday and what was needed for Thursday was “emergent.” The field trips were “harvested” by our newly-trained sketchnote artists from Monday’s workshop. (You can see the agenda here.)

Day 1 – Opening

img_20161003_163440

nancyrecordingby keerthiraj siddapuraAs one might expect in Cameroon, there is still a strong sense of formality and meetings being opened by dignitaries. In my experience, they often arrive late. This time they were EARLY and we scrambled to get in the room and set up. There was a very small window for set up, but it was so cool that the Fine Hotel made a recording board for me. You can see how lovely and BIG it was in the photo by Keerthiraj Siddapura at right. (Thanks, Keerthiraj – also one of our newly minted graphic recorders. You can see his full set of photos here.)

The formal opening was in French and the sound was VERY difficult, so the contents of the formal opening were … um… brief. The fact that Limbe is known as a “town of friendship” was the key piece for me. Graphic recording through translation is a tricky proposition at best. The second part of the opening was a conversation between the outcoming and incoming secretaries of GFRAS… the handing of the baton.  So overall, it was a pretty light piece for day one. You can visually see I still battle my “right hand downward tilt” as I record.

What was super fun was that for many in the room, this was their first time seeing graphic recording in action… including most of Monday’s workshop participants. So there at the back of the room I got a lot of attention between sessions and during breaks with people asking me “how do you DO this!” When the new GR’s passed by, we did a bit more analysis – what was working for me, for them and more importantly, what was challenging.  It was a good place of learning.

Day 2 – Keynote and Conversation on Agripreneurship

img_20161004_112341395_hdr

I was very luck to share a cottage with Day 2’s keynote, Dr. Merida Roets of South Africa. As we chit chatted over shared chocolate, I learned more about her, her work, and this strange new concept to me, Agripreneurship. (Know that this is a hard word for me to spell. I had to keep practicing.) After her talk, a panel came up to comment and their input is on the left. There is still a bit of jargon in here, like RAS (rural advisory services).

Merida had never had her talks recorded, so this was a fun new experience for her as well. Remember, she also took Monday’s workshop, so I could see the wheels turning in her head when she came by afterwards at my request to see if I missed or got anything wrong. In the end, she took this piece home with her, with a clear idea of where she was going to hang it in her offices. It turns out that while Merida and her team have been promoting and building agripreneurship capacity with rural farmers in South Africa, they had never heard of the term before either! 😉 Language is a funny thing.

By the way, the colors in these images are not very good. The lighting was difficult in the space. They look a little dull here. But as I was doing some coloring with Pan Pastels, it was also a time where our new GRs used the materials and tried shading and coloring on their sketch notes. So in the end, my space ended up as a little graphic recording lab at the back of the room for the full meeting.

In the afternoon I facilitated one of the four break out sessions and as part of my duties, created visuals for the report out on Thursday. I used Paperby53 to create a base image, then built on top of it to break out each of the elements for our presenter to share.

img_0483 img_0485

Day 4 – Harvest and Network Assessments

Day three people fanned out across the region to visit agripreneurs, farming cooperatives and other locations to see the work in action. Then on Thursday, the morning was the harvest of the Tuesday breakouts and Wednesday field trip reports. The field trip reports are at the bottom and the four breakout reports at the top. I used the metaphor of weaving basket threads together…sort of.

img_20161006_122445

My intention on this chart was to allow individual parts of the image to be pulled out in close up photos so that they could be woven into the meeting documentation. You can click on the thumbnails below to see some examples. All the images were provided digitally to the GFRAS team.

Next there was a network assessment activity led by Kevan and Alexa Lamm. Most of this session was work in groups, so I briefly captured their introduction on my iPad and then animated the sequence. This was done simply by saving the image as different files along the way. (Let’s see if the animated GIF plays correctly in the blog post. If not, you can find it here. )

kevan-lex-animation

I had made a few other iPad images as a way to demonstrate some electronic graphic recording.

There were some other paper sketches I made… nothing really worth sharing… but to empathize with our team that sometimes it can be hard to really pull something of substance out of short and informal presentations.

It was a great experience working with the GFRAS secretariat and all of the participants. I took MANY pictures with people in front of the images… lots of smiles. It has been a while since I did straight up graphic recording and not only was it fun (and sweaty – did I mention the aircon mostly did not work?) but it was a great way to link the workshop on Monday to real practice, to be able to reflect together on our work, and of course, to always remember how much more there is to learn!