(It’s been nearly nine years that I’ve been playing with Liberating Structures (LS). Now that LS is firmly in my practice, I’m finding ways to share it with everyone else. This blog series (Structuring our liberation – LS under the lens), looks at all structures, including some of the not-so-common structures from the LS repertoire).
Liberating Structures (LS) are deceptively easy to put in practice.
Though, I’ve found out along the way, quite hard to bring into our everyday habits, however simple they are. The difficulty of taking that first step…
One structure does stand out in this respect, and is typically the first and sometimes the only LS that people use: 1-2-4-all
1-2-4-all is the atomic bomb of Liberating Structures.
It’s so simple, it’s so tiny, and yet it’s so powerful, in so many ways… with repercussions way further down its ripples.
The power of this structure is in its simplicity – stripped to the core – and its simultaneous energy by involving ‘all’ indeed.
And I’m not the only one saying it…
What is the purpose of 1-2-4-all?
The official tagline says it all: “Engage everyone simultaneously in generating ideas, questions, or suggestions”.
1-2-4-all is one of the LS that is so versatile that it can be plugged, inserted, strung, twisted almost ubiquitously and infinitely.
But at its core, it helps indeed mobilise everyone and everyone’s ideas, and helping surface important patterns or outlier ideas…
How does it work?
In its orthodox version, this is how it works:
- You define an ‘invitation’ that people will be pondering, in response to a presentation, conversation topic, challenge, overall objective, or something else altogether e.g. “what makes me happy today?” “What seems like an essential feature for our product?” “What is the biggest elephant in this room?” etc.
- You let people individually mull over that invitation in silence for one minute.
- Then you invite people to pair up and share their respective thoughts in 2 minutes and to shape the ideas together, noticing similarities and differences
- Then you pair up the pairs to form quartets and get these groups of four people to share their thoughts for 4 minutes and hopefully synthesise anything coming up, identifying patterns and outliers
- When these 4 minutes have elapsed, you invite anyone from any of the quartets to share anything that deeply resonated with them or with their quartet as a whole. And you take any time between 3 and 7 minutes minutes to do that.
Simple, right?
The art is in coming up with a good invitation…
And sometimes in repeating 1-2-4-all to get to a better cycle of interactions…
Who could really benefit from 1-2-4-all?
1-2-4-all is so relevant and easy that anyone, anywhere, in almost any given context can benefit from it. Just try it and you’ll believe it.
What is liberating about it?
There are many remarkable things about 1-2-4-all:
- The fact that it starts with individual reflection pushes everyone to get beyond their first draft thinking – without mulling over it too much – and to shape up some more meaningful and refined insights
- And because it starts with individual reflection, it helps everyone contribute to the choir – so it’s an extremely democratic participation format that helps everyone find their ideas, their voice and their confidence in engaging more
- The groups remain small throughout the couple of iterations so there is still (some) space for everyone to talk. And no pushing anyone to speak up in the ‘all’ phase because there is no systematic debrief from every quartet… no one is put on the spot
- The process helps filter and synthesise patterns and big outlier ideas in a simple manner, bringing great ideas to the surface quickly, with ownership, and with a lot of energy
- The noise that progressively decreases – from the chirpy chattering of 1-on-1’s (which, in a big group, can be quite noisy) to the pairs, the quartets and eventually the ‘all’ phase where one voice is heard at a time. It has an incredible ‘sound of wisdom’ effect to it, somehow
- The plasticity of 1-2-4-all is liberating because you can keep using it in so many ways (in fact, it is embedded in various other structures such as What So What Now What, Ecocycle Planning etc.) and even many times in the same gathering without ever getting the feeling of repetition
- Its variations (see below) offer even more options to liberate great minds and ideas…
- And perhaps most importantly, because it is so powerful, 1-2-4-all can be the open door to the fabulous Pandora box of Liberating Structures at large.
How can it be stretched even further?
Here are some ideas from the Liberating Structures website:
- Graphically record insights as they emerge from groups
- Use Post-it notes in Rounds 2 and 3
- Link ideas that emerge to Design Storyboards, Improv Prototyping, Ecocycle Planning
- Go from groups of 4 to groups of 8 with consensus in mind. Colleague Liz Rykert calls this Octopus!
Here are a few others that have emerged in the LS Slack community and beyond:
- Repeat 1-2-4-all to get to finer results or a deeper level of inquiry
- Variations in the configuration of groups such as 1-3-all, 1-2-all, 1-all…
- 4-2-1-Snap (whereby the final minute of individual reflection is concluded with a finger snap by everyone)
- Stretching the time a bit for each step – though the LS spirit is never to invite people to have so much time that they revert back to typical pontificating tendencies…
- Drawing, or even miming the insight instead of saying it
Given the popularity of 1-2-4-all I’d be surprised if there were not many many more options out there!
And the beauty of it all: it works just as well online as on-site.
In any case I would guard you against skipping the individual part, which is so great to ground everyone in the conversation.
So what now?
Well, if the above has not convinced you of the value of trying it out – or any of its variations – I suppose you’re not cut out for Liberating Structures or may not put a premium on participation 😉
By all means, give it a go, reflect, adapt and share back what you have found out in your journey to the nuclear power of 1-2-4-all…
Related stories
See other post in this ‘LS under the lens‘ blog series. And also:
agilefacil 
Leave a comment