Boosting Team Collaboration With Liberating Structures
Kate Nimety, President, Management Consulting, Zuri Group
Ever felt like your team could use a little extra magic to work more effectively together? If you are faced with critical decisions, risk mitigation, or real problem-solving, it’s time to consider the world of Liberating Structures – a framework designed to supercharge your team’s collaboration and creativity. Activities like these can unlock your team’s productivity and potential, specifically around problem-solving and decision-making.
Liberating Structures (LS) were developed by Henri Lipmanowicz, former president of Merck Intercontinental, and Keith McCandless, co-founder of the Social Invention Group, to offer more impactful ways of engaging teams of Knowledge Workers than traditional methods like static presentations and unstructured, sometimes chaotic brainstorms. At Zuri Group, we’ve put LS into action both internally among our teams and with our partners to promote inclusivity, encourage creative engagement, and get at the root of a challenge or an underlying need in a way that traditional meetings often fail to accomplish.
Whether we’re performing a project assessment to get ready for a system selection, on a design sprint, or troubleshooting our own processes internally, Liberating Structures can help engage and include more voices, shift the lens to look at a challenge from a new angle, or discover a path forward you’d never considered. The founders compare LS to crowd-sourced knowledge and point out that the freedom to create in real-time has similarities to improv jazz. Structures are imperative to achieving results, and when a structure includes and encourages free movement within, it gains the inclusiveness of brainstorming. Pulling these elements together, LS are able to boost productivity and collaboration.
Three Liberating Structures in Action
When facilitating work with my clients, I have found that using Liberating Structures can transform the conversation in a way that opens up new possibilities for our partnership. I’m grateful to Jen Holmes for introducing them to me a few years ago – and I’m excited to share how a few of my favorites have helped our teams achieve success:
Nine Whys
When working with our clients, it can sometimes be difficult to identify the requirement or motivation at the core of a request or the underlying cause of a problem. Traditional troubleshooting might leave our clients searching for a solution to the immediate symptom; with the Nine Whys exercise, we can dig deeper into the situation together to discover and address the underlying cause.
Using this LS, when a team comes to us with a system challenge – “We don’t like how this system works” – we’ll ask questions to understand where the roadblocks are, why they are important to larger processes, and how it’s impacting them. Often, the underlying issues that arise during those conversations are very different from the initial complaint where we began. Similarly, when a client describes a pre-determined need – “We need this solution” – we’ll ask everything we can about how they’ll use the solution, why those uses are important, and what work-arounds they are currently using without this system. These questions help us understand exactly what is driving their need.
1-2-4-All
I love this model because of the power it has to allow those who do not feel comfortable speaking in a large group to still have their voice heard equally. The 1-2-4-All exercise is a simple way to make sure everyone’s feedback is received. When facilitating generative conversations with a client during a design sprint, I’ll introduce this LS as an opportunity to take a pause in the working session. Whatever the topic or question at hand is, I’ll ask the group first to take some time to think for themselves; then we’ll share in pairs, then in larger groups, and then we’ll all come back together.
This structure works best when the group is a mix of assertive and deferential personalities or when trying to make a decision that requires rumination or a group consensus. At its best, it results in the quieter folks in the room getting their voice heard. In practice, we’ve seen this structure help teams struggling to tell the full story of their design needs get to the root of the issue. By asking folks to come into the room prepared to have a discussion, more voices were heard, opening up our ability to collaborate over a real solution.
Troika Consulting
In a conference workshop focused on strategic problem-solving, Jen Holmes introduced the Troika Consulting exercise as a way to facilitate peer-to-peer coaching, connection, and support in taking action toward difficult problems. By giving each member of the small group the opportunity to be “the client” and gather feedback from two fellow leaders in their field and then the chance to collaborate over solutions as the “consultant” for their peers, this structure creates the valuable opportunity to share relevant problems and gain new perspectives. Attendees of the workshop looked for opportunities to keep those connections going after the exercise ended, lunching together after the session and staying in touch long term. Connecting your experts with their peers and offering them the space to get support in taking action toward difficult challenges can be massively impactful, not just toward immediate problem-solving but also for the long term.
This is one reason why Zuri Group prioritizes connecting our clients with other clients. The opportunity to talk with someone who shares similar challenges creates space for innovative solutions. As a networking and collaborative exercise, this LS can be a game-changer when coaching a senior leadership team, establishing board relationships, or getting a government structure in place.
The Case for Using Liberating Structures With Your Team
When working with and among teams, it always helps to have tools at the ready to amplify voices, smooth obstacles to creative problem-solving, and foster collaborative conversation. These kinds of tools have had a transformative impact on our work with clients. Where traditional planning meetings and brainstorms might have offered a superficial, quick-hit solution, digging deeper and building inclusive conversations can offer something more meaningful. By understanding the underlying need behind a client’s challenges, we’ve been able to offer solutions that provide long-term success and adoption and support the growth of the teams involved in a way that the client didn’t think could be satisfied by the scope and boundaries of the initial project.
The great news is that each of these options is easy to start using right away, during a staff meeting or retreat with your team. Consider opportunities to pair each of the Liberating Structures exercises with the right scenario by thinking through which structure can be most effective to address which challenges. These 33 structures offer a library of go-to tactics you can draw from whenever the need arises.
Once you put Liberating Structures in action with your teams, I’d love to hear how they impacted your projects and organizations. What have you learned about putting theory into practice? Let us know by sending a note to innovations@zurigroup.com – or give me or your favorite Zuri Group contact a shout if you want to talk through the opportunities these strategies can offer your team!