Community Room signage at the La Conner Swinomish Library in English and Lushootseed.
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.
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.
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 threevideoswhich 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.”
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
When working in a network comprised of technical folks, it is easy stay in the familiar territory of presenting knowledge when the network gathers. Sometimes make assumptions about scientists, or policy makers, or engineers about how they prefer to interact at a face to face meeting. Watch that “fluffy” stuff!
Visual notes from the day
My sense is a lot of this push-back originates in bad experiences where “interactive methods” were used for interactivity and perhaps less focused on the purpose at hand. With this in mind, I had a blast developing an agenda and coaching the facilitators for the Floodplains by Design Network gathering. I wanted to reflect and pull out some of the highlights of the process, both to acknowledge the fabulous team and the network participants, and to give some clarity on designing for networks, especially technically oriented networks.
Ditch the tables: People walked into the room to find a chair set of concentric circles – and were surprised. Coached to put their coats and backpacks to the side, there was a sense of “what is happening?” The folks kicking off the meeting had to adopt a new position to speak to and within a circle, but they quickly got the beat. Without tables, it was as simple as turning to someone to engage in conversation, look across the room to notice faces. The conversational sound level never wavered!
Nurture network relationships: Networks balance on the three legs we often use to define communities of practice: community (relationship), domain (what we care about – in this case integrated floodplain design), and practice (what we actually DO!) It is easy in a technical field to skip the community element so we started the day with a round of Impromptu Networking facilitating three rounds of short conversations about what we are grateful for in this work. Three new or deepened relationships along with domain knowledge! No fluffy “icebreaker.” The team crafted the invitation so it would resonate with the people in the room – something, by the way, I would have gotten wrong had I designed by myself. TEAMS, people, TEAMS!
The knowledge is in the room: use it! We used a modified version of Shift and Share to highlight as many stories of integrated floodplain work as we could to spotlight both the small and big steps being taken, and surfacing useful lessons for spreading. Along the way, people connect and relationships are nurtured in these rotating, purposeful conversations. We divided the short 5 minute talks, each followed by 10 minutes of conversational Q&A into five thematic “pods,” each with a “poderator” to help track time and capture highlights. We fully encouraged everyone to vote with their feet and move between talks, stay in a pod, visit all the pods, or just hover and bumblebee around. I was surprised that quite a few people stuck to a single pod and suspect there was growing identification and affinity around the pod topics.
Networks that rely primarily on voluntary participation need to focus on what matters, not on EVERYTHING. To help identify what to STOP doing, we did TRIZ, a reverse engineering process to identify the stuff we are doing that is not adding value. This one baffled some people in the room, leading us to consider how we might deepen the structure if we had a “do-over.” But we discovered later in debriefings that some people really got it and came to some tough conclusions about how the work might need to shift. So it may have also been a little bit of “elephant in the room” going on. I found it fascinating to watch the dynamics of acknowledging that sometimes the stuff we are doing doesn’t matter. A tough one.
Always find the next step. From the TRIZ we invited people to think about their 15% solution of what they could stop doing, and recommendations to the wider network of the more gnarly things that require a bigger lift to stop at a larger level. There were a few very concrete network recommendations, and some people began to crack open that they DID have some agency to stop things — or start them. That is always the temptation, to add before we clear the decks a bit.
Use the knowledge in the room. As we started the day by noticing the knowledge in each other, so we wrapped things up with Troika Consulting to get specific feedback on the 15% solutions. In knee-to-knee trios, people dug in to help each other. When we asked for a show of hands of who gained valuable “consulting” from their peers, almost every hand in the room went up. In after-event conversations people noted that this activity and the Shift and Share had high value for them.
Don’t forget the reflection with space for every voice. We finished in a circle, just like we started, with a “Just Three Words” debrief with everyone having a chance to say something or pass. Many of the words were captured on the right side of the visual above… you may notice a pattern.
Troika Consulting
There were a lot of smiles at the end of the day. The facilitation team did a fabulous job – mama mia, were they talented. The feedback was both positive and criticisms were super constructive, instead of generally grumpy. There was, from where I observed, a tangible pulse of energy.
Heather leaned in!
All kinds of people find value in engagement. Some need it a bit slower, some a bit faster, some need more space for reflection. But in a learning network, we need each other, so we need to design our meetings to truly BE with and ENGAGE with each other. Hats off to the Floodplains By Design team who had the courage to step outside of the “way things are done” and create that dynamic design. You KEEP GOING Heather, Carol, Courtney, Leah and all the shift and share speakers/poderators!
My lovely Liberating Structures (LS) community of practice has a monthly newsletter. December’s will be around LS online and as I started marking up their draft, I realized it would be a good idea to get my thinking/practices more clearly outlined rather than trying to “think out loud” and potentially make a mess of their draft!
What I’m laying out here could be extrapolated to other group processes, not just Liberating Structures. My goal is to describe how I think, talk and practice in online facilitation. I’m going to use the LS “Purpose to Practice” as the scaffold. The beauty of a scaffold is that it holds up an ever-evolving understanding of the practice, versus a static set of “best practices” or the like. This first version will stay at a pretty high level, and then it might be interesting to do some future posts digging deeper into each area.
Purpose
Why is this work important to me and the wider community? Purpose exists on a couple of different levels here. At the highest, the purpose of this post is to share learnings about how we transfer facilitation of offline group processes into an online space. In this particular instance, I’m focusing on LS and primarily synchronous online interactions using group meeting tools. My ultimate purpose is to use LS online so that people are easily and delightfully engaged and liberated to achieve their own purpose(s).
Purpose from an LS perspective – the integrity of an LS used online or offline – should be consistent with the structure and theoretically is not informed by the environment.
Purpose informs what structures people use, regardless of environment. In practice, people use each LS in different ways. For example, the stated purpose on the LS site guides us, but our ability to riff and improvise may surface other, unique purposes.
When thinking about the online environment, there may be more than one LS to choose in terms of what that structure enables (its purpose), but one of those options may be more suited to the online environment. For example, when the harvest of a process is important, an online environment makes it easy for everyone to type in and capture their input, faster and easier than a wall of sticky notes. The harvest is done by all, not by the facilitator. The data can be quickly organized, parsed and we can bring forth the best of what was produced.
People’s individual experience and practices using LS also vary. Some of us have favorites that we go to over and over. This may bias towards or away from using LS online because of our comfort of using a particular LS and how easy it is to transfer its use online.
Principles and Minimum Specifications
What rules must we obey to achieve our purpose? What are the minimum specifications, things we must absolutely do/not do? Again, principles exists on different levels. There are my personal principles as a facilitator/participant which drive my practices. There are the principles that sit beneath Liberating Structures . (Or whatever processes you use.) There are the principles of the individuals and group involved. I am excluding my personal principles/generic facilitator principles and will mostly focus on principles that arise from the online environment and which inform minimum specifications and practices. The other levels are very rich areas for future exploration!
Here are my general principles for using LS online:
Practice with others. The online environment can be unkind to multitasking… (Min Spec: Find a co-facilitating friend)
Use the power of alternating individual, small and large group interaction. Don’t fall trap to top-down online meetings, especially since most technologies favor top-down. (Min spec: unless the group is very small, don’t stay in a large group the whole time – a.k.a “goat rodeo”)
When in doubt, keep things simple. From technology, to process – simplicity gives room for experimentation and emergence. For example, while we might rapidly restring our structures F2F, we may not always be as prepared to do that as quickly online without a deeper practice. From a tech perspective, we might keep our technology set simple. (Min spec: never introduce more than two new tools to a group. One is ever better!)
Be prepared to be surprised (and innovate, use plan b, etc!) Technology (and the supporting infrastructure like bandwidth and even electricity) are rarely under your control. (Min spec: stay cool! Have a backup plan. Set reasonable expectations.)
Position everything as an experiment and a chance to learn, even while focused on real and urgent purposes. Let go of thinking everything can and should be perfect. (Min spec: let go of the identity of an expert.)
People/Participants
Who must be included to achieve our purpose? This one is much easier because there is little distinction between online and offline. The main benefit may be that online we might possibly include MORE people than we could if we were limited to a face to face interaction. In general, my overall facilitation principles drive me to include everyone who is engaged/impacted by the purpose to participate. Even if they are spread all across the globe. That is one of the driving strengths of doing things online, despite the challenges.
Structure
How will we organize to distribute control? Traditional design and use of online meeting tools have centralized control to the person who has administrative control of the meeting software. Sometimes additional people can be given these “host” or “admin” roles, partially or fully. But the central design of these tools has prioritized control over emergence, theoretically to offer a more consistent experience. Liberating Structures, on the other hand, is designed to engage and unleash everyone. So it is super important to figure out how to hack these tools to distribute control. Here are three potential vectors for distributing control. I’m sure there are more. Ideas?
Control can be distributed by handing off control of the software. I start by sharing my screen, now you can share yours. Here, why don’t you work on setting up the breakout groups while I review the process?
Control can be explicitly shared by identifying and distributing /switching roles. I’ll facilitate the process, you work on the technology support. Everyone can take notes in the chat. Invite people into those roles early and often.
Control can be distributed byfacilitators being quiet for a while. Some of us facilitators have this urge to fill every second of air time. Silence can give others a chance to breathe, think, and then participate in a way that is easier for them. Facilitators, IT IS NOT ABOUT US!! This is also a practice.
Practices
What are we going to do? This is where it gets practical. It is also where it may be more useful to describe practices through examples of how to use specific LS online. So I’ll start general, then we can dive into specifics in future posts.
For me there are two intersecting sets of practices: the process facilitation and the technology stewardship. I (along with John D. Smith and Etienne Wenger) have written extensively about technology stewardship. You can get the book (free!) on the Digital Habitats book site, and I will focus only on LS related facilitation and tech stewardship issues. You will also note how these are related to principles stated above!
Don’t do this alone. Have one person focus on the technology stewardship issues while the other facilitates process. It can be devilishly hard to do both at one time. For example, individuals with tech problems need one on one private “back channel” assistance that doesn’t suck up the time and attention of the whole group. Setting up breakout rooms is best done with attention, not while multitasking with process instructions.
Select and use technology to facilitate the large group/small group/individual levels of participation that are found in LS. For me the profound difference of using LS online and more traditional “web meetings” or “webinars” is that they enable peer to peer, multi-directional interaction versus being the object of a stream of content from one or few people.
Use multiple modalities beyond voice. We humans pay less attention to verbal interactions when we aren’t facing each other. Video can help – a bit – but not resolve our lackadaisical listening skills. So important instructions (how to do a LS, the invitation, etc.) should also appear visually on a slide, whiteboard or chat room. Don’t underestimate adult’s ability to quickly forget the instructions as well, so make sure they are visible in breakouts. Use images, drawing tools – whatever it takes to create a closer cycle of information exchange and UNDERSTANDING.
Keep technology choices as simple as possible. For example, if you pair the web meeting tool Zoom with Google Docs, it may seem really easy if you already have a Google Doc practice. For someone totally new to both, it may be enough to learn one tool at a time. For experts, pile it on! Just because we can use a ton of tools doesn’t mean we always SHOULD. A subset of this is “always keep an eye out for new tech” – the landscape is constantly evolving.
Beware of the heaven/hell of harvesting online. Online tools make it easy for everyone to write/draw/contribute. When it comes to sensemaking and harvesting, be careful of creating too much useless/never used content. Ask people to ruthlessly evaluate and harvest the best of what is created.
Don’t restrict yourself. Think through how you will use an LS online based on your purpose instead of slavishly following the instructions in a literal manner. Use your imagination and the strengths of the technology you are using rather than fighting the limitations. This is a great place to expand your LS repertoire. (Again, there should be a whole post on using the LS Matchmaker with an online perspective. Some of us have been trying to capture our current state of understanding of this.)
Give most LS a bit more time online, especially when learning how to do them online. Don’t over-pack your sequence or “string” of structures. While I might do 3-5 in 90 minutes F2F, I’d say 3 online! To date, almost all the LS I’ve used online take more time the first time (sometimes a LOT more time). We get better over time, but if you are always working with new people, build in learning time. And in a perfect world, get the chance to do these together more than once. It gets richer and richer. Another perspective is spreading out a string over multiple, shorter online meetings. Most of us burn out after 90 minutes of full on attention online.
Reflect on the similarities and differences of a structure/string online and offline. Chances are this will deepen your overall understanding and facilitation practice, and expand possibilities each time you reflect, learn, apply, and repeat! Better yet, reflect with your peers. Use What, So What, Now What? to debrief at every chance. Share your learnings with the Liberating Structures community of practice on Slack.
Clark Quinn has a great provocation on his blog today. I ‘ll share a quote, then reply.
So, many of the things we’re doing are driven by bad implementation. And that’s what I started wondering: are we using smart technology to enhance an optimized workforce, or to make up for a lack of adequate preparation? We could be putting in technology to make up for what we’ve been unsuccessful at doing through training and elearning (because we’re not doing that well).
To put it another way, would we get better returns applying what’s known about how we think, work, and learn than bringing in technology? Would adequate preparation be a more effective approach than throwing technology at the problem, at least in some of the cases? There are strong reasons to use technology to do things we struggle at doing well, and in particular to augment us. But perhaps a better investment, at least in some cases, would be to appropriately distribute tasks between the things our brains do well and what technology does better.
Let me be clear; there are technologies that will do things more reliably than humans, and do things humans would prefer not to. I’m all for the latter, at least ;). And we should optimize both technology and people. I’m a fan of technology to augment us in ways we want to be augmented. So my point is more to consider are we doing enough to prepare people and support them working together. Your thoughts?
While Clark’s question is in the context of workplace learning, it is resonant in far wider contexts. I see it when I’m asked to design group process and gatherings. We are constantly putting “band aids” on instead of addressing underlying issues. We don’t really “prepare people and support them working together.” Why is that? Is it the continued desire for a quick fix, or the deep denial that how we work together matters and making it work more effectively might challenge too many things: power, status quo, cost?
The observation of this problem is neither new nor unique… it is how things often work. So the question is how do we better shine a light on the underlying issues and take immediate steps — however small – for remediation? Rather than throw up our hands and say it is too messy, hard or difficult?
This is where complexity-informed practices come in. From the deep dives into understanding what is happening with sense-making tools like Cognitive Edge’s Sensemaker, to simple, reproducible group practices like Liberating Structures, we can stop shrugging our shoulders and saying “that’s out of my scope of work” or “I can’t do anything about that.” The point is we have to do SOMETHING. Not just plow on from tech innovation to tech innovation. Here are four possible sets of practices that could help us go deeper and do better. Here are four possible sets of actions.
Creative Destruction to Make Space
What one thing, no matter how tiny, can we stop doing to make space for the things we want to try? Before we add a new technology, do we stop using another one? Before we seek a solution to an efficiency problem, can we find out what to stop doing that caused the problem? Cue up Ecocycle or TRIZ, and make some of these now-useless activities visible. So often we strive to manage and scale when we have either grown past the things we are scaling, or they are no longer fit for purpose. We operate in mostly dynamic environments, yet we try and shoehorn everything into an ordered domain. (The complicated and simple in the Cynefin framework. In an ordered domain “cause and effect are known or can be discovered.” Complex and chaotic domains are understood as unordered, where ” cause and effect can be deduced only with hindsight or not at all.”).
Space for Uncertainty and Experimentation
Maybe certainty and obsession with technical fixes is overrated. Earlier this week I participated in an online gathering hosted by Johnnie Moore on Unhurried Conversations. He offered five principles to support unhurried conversations and one was The wisdom of uncertainty. We can use uncertainty to experiment our way into useful solutions, rather than coming up with a “brilliant idea” that may inadvertently build on past weakness. We may miss the underlying preparation. We can use Improv Prototyping to “act our way into knowing.” We can use Helping Heuristics to strengthen our listening before we pounce with our own (half baked?) ideas, giving space to considerations that are lost for those of us who “think by talking.”
Leadership for Spotting and Picking Up Promising Experiments
When we start getting seduced by technological innovation, it reminds me that there are people who see the world differently and can look within and beyond the tech itself and spot the ideas for promising experimentation. Not everyone has these skills to imagine things. We want solutions and we tend to foreclose on them too quickly, or fail to do, as Dave Snowden loves to say, “safe fail” experimentation to test our assumptions and asses the complexity (or not) of a situation. Sometimes that means we are smart enough to notice others with these strengths, and not try and be the “solution maker” ourselves. Approaches such as Wicked Questions , Discovery and Action Dialog, and Critical Uncertainties can help us spot the things we might otherwise rush by.
Right Management of the Right Things
I do not want to dismiss the Ecocycle domain of “maturity.” When there is a useful technical application, we want to bring it productively into the work. Same for process issues. Not everything is uncertain and shifting. The critical issue is HOW we manage these things into maturity, and how do we ensure we don’t repeat the cycle of “getting stuck” when that thing ceases to add value. And how leaders and managers can both work in this quadrant of maturity while at the same time supporting the other three areas of creative destruction, networking and birth. Great leaders and managers do their magic in the maturity quadrant AND support others to deploy their strengths in the unordered domains. Keep a critical eye on what must be destroyed, reimagined/imagined and birthed, even if it is not their own area of expertise and comfort.
A “latticework” of mental models https://www.farnamstreetblog.com/mental-models/
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