1-2-4-all, the atomic bomb of Liberating Structures (LS under the lens)

(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?

Nadia blogged about this a few years ago already (image credit: Nadia von Holzen / Learning Moments)

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.

(photo credit: LS Seattle community)

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:

• We > Me, but we still need all ‘I’s’ on board and on the prize…
• Use quality face-to-face time for synergy, not for logorrhea
• The Russian dolls of Liberating Structures: from chocolate box to Pandora’s box

Learning from an extraordinary experience: the first ever ‘Liberating Journey’

This Liberating Journey was a ‘never done before‘ for me, and us all.

6 months of exploring how the Liberating Structures repertoire could act as starting point towards a specific, focused, intentional change.

Be it about a toxic culture, a meeting routine, setting up a project, working with a network etc.

For 6 months, our group of 13 explorers (us 3 ‘sherpas’ and 10 amazing fellow travellers) met on a monthly basis for our ‘village meetings’ to check each step of the Strategy Knotworking framework together. And we also met about 10-15 times in our three respective ‘crews’ of 4-5 people to delve more deeply into this change we wanted to see happen.

The result was an incredible epiphany for all of us…

So what did I learn?

These are some of the random things that I learned about myself, my fellow sherpas (Nadia von Holzen and Jeremy Akers), travellers, Liberating Structures (LS) and the journey itself:

Training is great – even necessary – but not enough and this journey shows why…

This is the kind of work that I want to keep supporting!

I believe in training, it’s an essential ticket to start building our capacities and knowledge in certain areas. I’m currently organising two different training courses so I definitely won’t say training is not useful ha ha ha…

But if training is not followed up, it leads to… nothing… And there’s so much waste of resources, time, enthusiasm going into training (thinking it will turn us into super-heroes, and all too often making organisations feel like they’ve done their job at capacitating their staff – tick the box and quickly forget 🙂‍↔️).

So instead, offering a ‘post-training’ support system presents a great opportunity to hone freshly acquired skills and to meld that with practice and reflection, alone, in small and larger groups. Context becomes central, not the skills to focus on in a typical training.

Our travellers showed they were super hungry to get to that whole other level and that’s only encouraging us even more to proceed with liberating journeys.

Such a journey offers a great opportunity to demonstrate your skills and to take deep ownership

(photo credit: Fionn Claydon / Unsplash)

We co-organised the village meetings a few times, we had all crew meetings organised in rotation by and/or with crew members, and we (sherpas) invited our explorers to organise their own ‘picnics’ to address a topic dear to them.

Our participants embraced this empowering delegation very much and were able to bring their learning edges. They did so to ‘fail forward’ (in a safe-fail environment), to learn together in designing and delivering these gatherings, and to find useful feedback in the process.

The net result is that we all ended up owning this process even more and finding more energy and motivation to do more of that in our respective contexts. And that’s the end game: bring the fire from the expedition back to their regular groups, colleagues, partners…

What is clear is that we’ll empower the next cohort even more, co-designing more systematically, inviting more picnics, and spending more time to debrief and learn about the work we did at a meta-level.

Though we were sherpas – supporting in the background – there was a clear appetite from our explorers to learn more from our own experiences

Storytelling – the nicest way to collective learning… (photo credit: Mike Erskine / Unsplash)

Our explorers expressed their appetite to hear us share more of our stories, advices, insights, questions, our successes and our failures, our doubts and our convictions.

The few times we explored some ‘case studies’ from our own experiences it was incredibly well received and it showed also the power of narratives.

I guess we were a bit shy to make this about our experience, but in hindsight it makes sense, in some sort of vague ‘apprenticeship model’ that sharing our learning more prominently would be a winner, so long as it remained in the background and in support of the entire group.

So the next Journey will definitely feature more cases, stories and reflections from our side, and inviting everyone else to follow suit with their own experience, because we all learn a lot more from concrete cases than from theoretical platitudes ha ha ha.

The video below shares more insights from us by the way…

Confusiasm takes time to build, and perhaps should not be expected after training (but definitely happens in the journey)

Even though Jeremy, Nadia and had a plan, we adapted it along the way, constantly. And because we are very different, the three of us, sometimes it felt like our journey was not landing on a very clear plan or line of thinking.

And though we didn’t know upfront what would be our landing point, the three of us were clear that there would be some of that confusion. And that not only that confusion would be unavoidable, but it is also desirable. Out of confusion the unknown emerges, our emotions surge, we get beyond the platitudes and ‘business as usual’ thinking.

In other words: we had built a journey that would help stimulate everyone’s confusiasm: a habit of feeling comfortable with the discomfort of unclarity, un-linearity, insecurity. Because we see this as the source of resilience and creativity.

However, it was perhaps surprising that despite having some more advanced LS practitioners than in an immersion workshop, not everyone was confusiastic at first. More than once we could feel the anguish of our explorers: “where is this leading?”, “how does this connect to the previous step?”, “what does that mean for us all right now?”… And while sometimes we alleviated some of that unclarity, at other moments we let everyone linger in that confusion to find the questions they needed to see.

(quote: apparently from Confucius – for the laugh, ‘confusiasm’ is often confused for ‘confucianism’ 😉

And perhaps by the 4th village meeting, I can safely say that everyone was more or less on board with confusiasm. The penny had dropped for all that the discoveries of the journey mattered more than the ultimate destination of the journey. They had the tools, they had the instinct, they had the energy, and now they had the conviction that out of confusion something beautiful could emerge. All elements were in place for a beautiful journey to unfold until its ending.

Side note: the diversity among us sherpas was probably all to the benefit of everyone as we each brought a lens, our respective strengths covering for each other’s respective ‘improvables’ and we thus offered different ‘grips’ to that discomfort, for everyone to pick and choose the elements that made sense to them the most.

Such a rich experience deserves a stronger documentation and visualisation

The knowledge manager in me felt this need coming up more and more strongly as the journey went on. We need to document this journey, this experience, at all levels:

At the level of our entire village, we eventually did so through a Miro board visualising our journey, the why, what and how of every step etc. This was as a response to a demand that our explorers formulated in the WINFY (What I Need From You) exercise which we hosted in the 5th village meeting. And in the next journey, I reckon we’ll take more steps to ensure we are documenting the journey better from the get-go.

A related element is the debriefing and documentation related to specific Liberating Structures we used. Our group had varying levels of experience with LS but even then, most of them actually welcomed the idea of debriefing the structures, and strings of structures, that we used to better harness lessons about it.

At the level of each crew, not so much happened other than the set of slides, optional Google doc and Miro board used to share elements for each crew meeting. But in the next journey we will perhaps organise this in a way that each crew can map its own aspirations, questions and findings better.

(photo credit: Ashlynn Ciara / Unsplash)

At individual level, I suppose everyone took their own notes (or not), but it seems to me like a missed opportunity not to have invited everyone to journal our thoughts, reflections, findings, questions. We will likely introduce some sort of basic journaling template in the next journey, and build moments of individual reflection to journal in the sessions also.

There are so many reflections emerging from such an experience: about our ‘mountain’ (the metaphor we used for our change goal), about our questions and unclarities, about ourselves, about our practice, about our repertoire, and about what it means for the ecosystem in which we bring back all this learning outside of the journey experience.

We sherpas learned a ton about ourselves, about our own ‘mountain’ and about Liberating Structures

And so, deriving from the last point I just made, we three also learned a ton from this journey. And we wouldn’t have been able to without the help of Carlos, Corinna, Dan, Flavia, Frank, Julie, Nathalie, Philip, Silvia and Szandra. So a big THANK YOU to you all!

(photo credit: Unsplash+)

For myself, I learned a lot about the journey process – reflected here. I also learned that my mountain (which was about helping everyone have fewer but better meetings) is not attainable but can count on many supporters that are already active in this and I know who to reach out to. I also learned about my own leadership qualities and the usefulness of the paradoxes I carry with me. I learned to dance with Jeremy as well as Nadia better. I learned to appreciate letting go of supporting everyone at every step (and instead of letting everyone struggle a bit more for their own sake). I learned about how to apply Strategy Knotworking in a more grounded way. I learned about specific structures I hadn’t used much or not used in the same way (Integrated Autonomy, Social Network Webbing, Panarchy).

And more importantly of all, I learned that my appetite for hosting such journeys is definitely matched by the aspiration of many change makers to use Liberating Structures to effect change!

I’m hungry for more 🐲

Are you? Get in touch! 🤗

As a bonus, see below a video about the ‘celebrity interview’ that one of our explorers (Silvia De La Torre) aptly hosted with us 3 sherpas. A delight to touch base with most of the crew again and to explore interesting insights about the Liberating Journey and LS at large.

Related stories

• Community – the oil that keeps our fire burning
• The Russian dolls of Liberating Structures: from chocolate box to Pandora’s box
• When Liberating Structures becomes a lot more than ‘a toolbox’ and reveal their true transformative power…

Community – the oil that keeps our fire burning

Let me enforce an open door here 😜

At work and in life, everything starts and ends with us human beings… People!

As much as there’s hardly anything worth it more in this life than love (and perhaps finding/sharing your purpose), there’s also hardly anything more worth it at work than really engaging, heart to heart, soul to soul, with people, influencing them in the noble sense of the word, and getting influenced by them, to create magic together.

So it hardly comes as a surprise that developing our ‘community of kindred spirits’ is of the essence here. Certainly if you’re in the collaboration and/or facilitation business.

At least, that is if you want to maintain your energy against the cynical and countering forces on the way to the change you want to see. And also if you want to keep your eyes on your purpose.

Community – the secret to keeping the long view (photo credit: Helena Lopes / Unsplash)

Why create a community around us?

Why enforce this open door?

Because our increasingly materialistic and individualistic world (mixed with an unwelcome layer of retreating into our private caves through the COVID lockdown experience) can easily keep us away from deepening connections with one another.

With that individualistic mindset, it can be tempting, or even just unconsciously easy, to just grab, grab, grab everywhere (Me! Me! Me!) without giving back.

That is NOT a community approach. And though it may help in the short run, it most certainly doesn’t in the long run.

And then, I’m also enforcing this open door because in the past few weeks countless experiences have kept bringing me back to this: ‘duh!! It’s all about community’

We just completed our first ever Liberating Journey and that has been an INCREDIBLE experience, so full of learning and confusiasm, discoveries, energy, failings, adaptations, celebration, support, warmth. But the red thread of it all has been… community and connection. With our 10 explorers, Nadia, Jeremy and I have hosted a group of people that became a pretty tight-knit community of Liberating Structures explorers (us included!). So much so that the group is now hellbent on keeping gatherings going to stay in touch and keep learning together. As for the learning on the Liberating Journey itself, more is coming up pretty soon on this blog!

Of course community is the be-all-end-all of a… community such as Never Done Before (#NDB), the facilitation community. Week in week out many of us find resources, ask questions, find answers, find next questions, find help, find opportunities, find courage, face failings, metabolise learning into precious experience through the community. And various NDB sessions I’ve attended recently have only further highlighted the importance of having a community of friends or peers that can help you in your practice, learning and presence (how you show up).

Community is synergy (photo credit: Kraken Images / Unsplash)

I’m about to get into the next cycle of the ever-excellent study group on ‘multi-stakeholder collaboration’ hosted by Community At Work (C@W) and there again I find that the community spirit is, together with the high professionalism and preparedness of our C@W mentors, at the heart of the incredible energy that this study group provides me – enough in any case to make me want to get up at 3am 6 to 8 times a year for 3 hours of exchange ending in the wee hours of my morning.

Convene is quickly becoming a professional family also. On top of the soul-tinkling work that they do, and the original friendship with Amanda that has brought me close to Convene, it’s really the community spirit that is permeating throughout everything Conveners do, together with the amazing ‘constellation’ they’ve conjured up, that makes me want to work more with them.

And then on the back of all that is my own community of friends which brings together some members of all the above-mentioned communities also. The generosity of my own community, their kind heart, their inspiring soul, their incredible wit and wisdom, have brought me so much energy, pleasure, inspiration and opportunities that my gratitude will never be enough to pay the tribute back to them.

Community is what has always ‘kept the fire alive’ for me, as this metaphor came on my path brought along by another community I used to be a very active member of (Knowledge Management for Development / KM4Dev). I wouldn’t be who I am and do what I do without these communities.

Developing our community is a no-brainer. It’s an obvious win for everyone, just like a smile 😃

So now the why is clear, how to build a community?

This is a message to all of you wondering how to find the energy, ideas, inspiration, comfort, next moves… If you’re working on collaborative change it’s a drudging path at times. Cynicism is rife, self-doubt and the ‘imposter syndrome‘ affect us all, and the magnitude of change we want to see can lead to despair when we put on our grey-shaded glasses, out of fatigue or otherwise.

If you don’t surround yourself with people that keep your fire alive, your fire can be suffocated by the inertia, negativity, resistance, or downright conflict with others, let alone by your inner saboteur.

So here are a few ideas for how to build that community – not pretending to be exhaustive here:

• If you have found your craft, your niche, your focus, hell even better: your ikigai, then look around for communities that exist out there in relation to it. Mingle, sniff, sense, feel if they are for you. And if they are, let go of any resistance and embrace the beauty of joining such a community;
• Once you are in a community, there’s nothing wrong about being silent or passive (that means you’re an empowered listener) but there is SO MUCH MORE to gain from being active, asking questions, sharing resources and experiences, hosting things, taking responsibilities. It just keeps on giving…
• As the saying above goes, find your mentors, follow people you respect and admire (healthily 😉 and ask them to be mentored by them. If they’re humane – and have the time for it, which may be more the issue – they will more often than not agree to it. And if there’s one thing I’ve learned from my 15 years of focus on knowledge management and learning, it is that the apprenticeship model of the medieval guilds is one of the surest ways to build deep, reliable expertise (notwithstanding an incredible journey of personal development!)
• With all your authenticity and integrity (the monthly theme of #NDB in April 2024), cultivate your own network of people who resonate with you – and hopefully reciprocally – as that is your professional family of friends, the people that have your back, and you have theirs. It’s such a rich exploration and voyage through life to have kindred spirits at your side.
• If you can, also try and develop a space for a community of ‘loving provocateurs’, the people that give you the truth without hiding behind political correctness; the devil’s advocates that call things out when they see it; the friends that help you realise your own blind spots and keep your natural excesses in check. It’s challenging, perfectly annoying at times, but so precious and important!
• And all the while, remember to share and give as much as you receive, and to cultivate gratitude for it.

🤔❓ What do you do to create and cultivate your community/ies?

PS. As a short tangent, I’ve updated the ‘about’ page on my website with a section on my professional ‘family of friends’.

Related stories

• We > Me, but we still need all ‘I’s’ on board and on the prize…
• How to turn language barriers into bridges?
• I am, you are, each of us is an ‘everyday facilitator’ – let’s cultivate this together!

How to turn language barriers into bridges?

Language is a fascinating topic to me.

I love learning languages, and love playing with them. As an aside, that’s perhaps why I love so much the Instagram account ‘The Language Nerds‘ (oh and I just found out through a friend about the podcast ‘lingthusiasm‘).

Whether referring to spoken languages (eg. English, Mooré, Thai, Spanish, Criollo) or to the jargon used in any given community or group, language does bear that wicked question:

😈❓How is it that #Language can be such a 🚧 barrier (with its in-crowds, secret language, simple and impractical inability to establish contact) and SIMULTANEOUSLY it can be a 🌉 bridge that brings people together? ❓😈

(your humble servant on his Friday LinkedIn ramblings)

Language can be a barrier

(photo credit: Mitchel Lensink / Unsplash)

Just a few ideas for how that might be:

• It’s a no-brainer that if you don’t speak a language, you’re automatically ‘out’ of the community that does speak it;
• Idioms (the official type) can even be used as coded/secret language. I sometimes use Dutch in France with my kids when I want a message to get to them and to them only;
• Jargon, acronyms, specific language can also bring meaning to people inside a group that shares that language, but it can (and often does) make people who don’t master that language feel outside, and unseen or disrespected. Or even inferior: upper-class, political, technical, academic language can tend to make people feel excluded and not as worthy of speaking in public…
• Even if you have some notions about that language, you may still feel a bit clunky in its use and may feel deterred to speak up. I find navigating LGBT+ or racial language slightly awkward myself and thus not always keen to talk of these matters even though at heart I’m totally supporting the LGBT+ cause…
• Assuming that everyone shares the same language can reinforce that feeling of being unseen, unrespected or unworthy for those who do not master that language being used…

Language can also be a bridge…

(photo credit: Alex Azabache / Unsplash)

Again just a few ideas…

• Duh! If you learn someone else’s language you can then communicate with that person in that language. Particularly handy if you don’t share any other common language;
• Even if you share another language with someone else, using their native tongue means (to me anyway) that you are meeting the real soul of the person, you are meeting them in their comfort zone, with the first language version of themselves (if they’ve learned other languages, they may have shaped slightly different layers of their identity and being through those other languages too). So it builds an extra connection. I think about Dutch people, who know so many languages and it’s so easy to speak English with them. But then you speak Dutch with them and a whole other world unravels in front of your eyes (and they have an endearing notch of affection for the fact that you bother learning their language which so many people find ugly and useless – I don’t btw).
• But even in the workplace, when you share the same jargon, you can speak more quickly about things. So it’s a practical way to build bridges towards efficiency;
• More importantly, using that jargon, including acronyms, private jokes and the likes creates a -conscious or not- sense of community for the people that share the language. That sense of community is a wonderful thing (provided it doesn’t make other people feel excluded);
• If a language is developed with a specific functional end in mind, it is also a bridge towards a different reality that people can see together. This is what happens with the language of e.g. Liberating Structures: it becomes a passport to the promised new lands (of thriving relationships, interactions, conversations, collaborations)…

So there is also some sense in that little language silo, so long as it’s not making itself consciously too important vis-à-vis other groups of people.

How to turn the barrier into a bridge?

The point here is that language is a learned property. It only takes time, dedication, and hopefully guidance, to master the language. We can use languages as beautiful bridges, but the bridges will be towering over other groups of people like barriers, if we don’t open these bridges.

So how about:

• We remain conscious of the language we use at all times. And if we see people who are not in a given language group, we can explain what that language means, translating on the spot the terms – or full sentence;
• We design our interactions with a keen eye on the language we use to avoid silos and senses of ‘out crowds’ and ‘in crowds’;
• We have conversations about what the language we use makes possible, reveals, emphasises. It helps us all see the beauty of sharp language and perhaps even helps us empathise with other people and other ways of apprehending the world…
• We make active efforts to bring people who don’t master a given language to get more and more proficient at it;
• We also take our responsibilities to call out abuse of the language, so we don’t let people feel rejected anymore, and rather invited to learn the language…

Demystifying the language of Liberating Structures

This whole post was inspired by a conversation I had with my dear friend Nadia von Holzen, when we reflected on the effect that the vernacular language of Liberating Structures tends to have on people who are exposed to it at first. It’s not easy. It’s awkward at times, even off-putting.
Find out more in the video below…

And if you want to demystify that LS language with us, join our upcoming immersion!

What role does language play in your facilitated interactions?

Related stories

• A daily dose of process literacy
• Some introspection about what ‘Liberating Structures’ are to me, and a little more…

How to get everyone to talk more equitably? Tactics, tips, tricks to tackle a tentacular trap

I love talking about facilitation!

The skill of facilitation is my passion and the cornerstone of my ikigai.

Whenever I talk about facilitation with groups, the one issue that keeps cropping up time and again, like a phoenix reborn of its ashes, is that of distributing talking time more equitably.

I hear variations of:

How to ensure we’re not trapped in only listening to the usual suspect? (Photo credit: Inc. Magazine)

How do I get people to share their thoughts?

How to make shy people contribute?

What can I do for introverts to speak up?

How can I ensure that we don’t just hear xyz (the most confident speaker[s] in the room)?

(said various people, in various forms, in various conversations)

The questions above actually allude to at least 3 different things:

• How to ensure the people that speak easily are not the only ones heard?
• How to make sure people share what’s on their mind generally?
• How to make sure that the people who tend to speak less are also heard and contributing.

It’s the latter challenge that I’m specifically focusing on here.

Side note: There are various reasons why people don’t speak up in meetings as you can watch in this video or that one. But why they don’t speak up is not my focus here. Perhaps for another blog post…

And how to finally hear that less usual suspect? (photo credit: Czarina Tabayoyong)

Here, I want to explore how we can make space for the not-so-usual suspects, as I am invited to share my facilitative experience on this issue time and again.

Therefore, last time this came up in a conversation, I decided to follow my meta reflex: instead of sharing it just for that conversation, I took the opportunity to nail this issue for the future and have a handy list of tips and tricks at the ready:

Here are my most common go-to approaches to ensure that the people who tend to speak less are also sharing their best thinking with the rest of the group:

(photo credit: Eugene Deshko / Unsplash)

Start with individual reflection

This really started much more intentionally with my Liberating Structures practice and I’ve found this to be soooo valuable: invite participants to take some time (it can be as short as 30 seconds, it can be one minute, two minutes, 5, heck, half an hour if you want) to collect their thoughts, at peace.

It helps introverts and slower thinkers to collect their thoughts and crystallise them. It gives introverts in particular some well appreciated quiet time. It invites extroverts to actually slow down and also reflect rather than talk straight off the bat.

When everyone shares their thoughts, in principle they have something slightly more distilled to contribute.

Use small breakouts to hear our own voice and take steps to feel more confident in higher risk arenas (like a plenary group)

A next obvious tactic is to let people build their own confidence or willingness to speak in smaller groups. It’s much easier to feel invited to talk when you’re just with 2-3 other people, let alone just one other person. In the process we both hear our voice which helps us remember we have a voice in larger groups.

We also tend to build more of a rapport with each other in smaller groups. This way, together we build psychological safety (the premise towards brave sharing) and thus feel more inclined to speak up and reveal more of our ‘private conversation’ with the rest of the group.

(image credit: Michael Cramer)

1-2-4-all as the mix and match of the previous two

It’s only natural to feature 1-2-4-all as a great way to liberate everyone’s voice because it builds on the opportunities from the previous two tactics, and does this in small, incremental steps.

If used repeatedly, 1-2-4-all makes it even easier to share more…

Use a talking object

(photo credit: Susan Kirsch / Unsplash)

Another simple yet powerful tactic is to impose the use of a ‘talking object’ (be it a microphone, a stick, a marker, a book, a Playmobil figure, whatever) whenever we want to talk. This is great as it invites us to both listen to all the voices very intently (when we don’t hold the object, we are invited to remain silent and listen to understand) and to speak without the fear that we will be interrupted by the confident, powerful, typical voices. Whether used in a specific participation format (e.g. a Conversation Café) or in an open discussion, a talking object can go a long way to create space for people who are likely not to talk much or even at all.

Structured go-arounds

This tactic is slightly more invasive – putting, one by one, everyone on the spot – but because it applies to everyone, it’s a more equitable and acceptable practice for everyone to speak up. And in a good structured go-around you can always pass your turn and come back in the next round (when you get to hear all the turns that were passed).

It typically starts with anyone who feels ready and then moves clockwise or anti-clockwise from there. Easier to use in a circle set up, but can be used in any setting. And dead easy to use online too.

Pass the baton / choosing the next speaker

(photo credit: unknown)

A slight variation to the structured go-around is to have the first person to speak to do their bit and once they’re done, to let them choose who speaks. Eventually, everyone gets to speak this way too.

Great, here too, to give the option to pass. Sometimes your turn comes and you’re not ready and it feels rather awkward to feel like we have to say something smart when we don’t feel ready. So that buys you more time to gather your thoughts.

And this can be with a ball (or even a ball of wool that entangles everyone, which can add a fun community building factor).

Switch to writing instead of talking

(photo credit: Unsplash+)

Public speaking is apparently the number one fear for many people (75% of people are affected by this glossophobia if one is to believe the article). So how about asking people to write instead of talking?

Whether on a post-it note or index card, or on a digital whiteboard, this tactic invites everyone to share their thoughts without the perceived risk of being ridiculed while talking in public (which even though a not founded fear, is at the heart of glossophobia).

Or even something else…

And if writing is still too rational, you may also resort to inviting people to draw, to use their body (miming, theatre, dancing) to share their views. This can be an incredibly refreshing break in the gathering. It definitely opens up new – and perhaps more suitable – avenues for people to share their insights and ideas.

Use a set of matchsticks

I was reminded recently of this technique which, frankly, I’ve never used, but it could prove very handy: Provide x matchsticks to everyone in the room (3? 5?). Every time they make an allocution, they give away one of their matchsticks. Once they have exhausted all their sticks, they just have to listen to everyone else.

This is great because it reminds the eager speakers of the risk of ‘burning’ their matchsticks too quickly. For the frugal speakers, it visually shows them the opportunity, and power, in their hands to speak up.

(Photo credit: Salah Ait Mokhtar / Unsplash)

Mak space for the quiet person / balance

Sometimes an active listening skill does the trick very nicely. You use ‘making space for the quiet person’ (read more about it in the Facilitator’s Guide to Participatory Decision-Making), in a plenary session, calling for voices that haven’t been heard for a while, without naming anyone in particular. The invitation is on the table for those that have not spoken much. And it’s a hidden reminder for the eager speakers that they may want to consider how much space they’re leaving for others. It doesn’t always work, but in combination with other tactics here, this can really help.

Similarly ‘balancing’ is inviting voices from a specific demographic. E.g. “Could we hear more female voices now?” or “What do the students think of this?” or “It would be great to hear the perspective of the community representatives on this topic”… These are gentle methods to invite less loud voices.

Use participation formats that deliberately create less pressure to speak up

Sometimes it’s the pressure to talk (often equated with a pressure to ‘perform’ and say something smart) that blocks people. Using participation formats that create a low pressure environment can be transformational.

Here, I’m thinking particularly of ‘unhurried conversations‘. In an unhurried conversation, anyone can speak, without interruption (it’s akin to using a talking object, and sometimes an unhurried conversation uses one such object) for however long you want, without actually having to speak up, to react, to answer, to pick up on anyone else’s thread. You can simply say whatever you want without being interrupted or judged. Sometimes that’s just what you need to speak up.

And as its champion Johnnie Moore says, it adds an incredible focus on listening for everyone else.

(photo credit: Johnnie Moore / Workshops Work)

Use participation formats that specifically make space for the quiet voices

Sometimes a participation format goes beyond the low pressure to speak and actually inverts it to create a platform for ONLY some people to speak: all fishbowls, a celebrity interview etc. can be a great opportunity to feature voices of people that are typically eclipsed by others in a gathering. If everyone else’s silent listening is ensured, it can be a powerful moment to hear precious thoughts and voices in the choir.

Offer a final opportunity for people to take their responsibilities to speak up before moving on

Not my preferred move, but sometimes it can also be useful to move on from a conversation by giving one last opportunity to anyone, especially the quiet person or unheard demographics, to make a final intervention before everyone accepts that the conversation is closed (at least for now). The sense of urgency can cause some people to suddenly speak up…

🤔 What other methods, tactics, tips and tricks do you have to balance the speaking time?

On this note, I leave you with a video specifically crafted for formal leaders. It looks at the other side of this reflection: when might you be talking too much (which is not only a valid question for formal leaders by the way)?

Related stories

• Yes to a ‘safe space’, and HELL YES to a safe and brave space (the next logical step)
• Welcome to the facilitation zoo!
• Process literacy perks: The participants, as ‘leaders in the shade’
• We > Me, but we still need all ‘I’s’ on board and on the prize…

Questioning questions in facilitation (My ‘aha moment’)

Personal change is fickle.

It’s hard to predict when the final straw is breaking the back of old habits.

It takes little wisps of straw. One by one. And then comes The One.

Ditto with ideas.

Sometimes you need to be confronted with little wisps of the same idea before – tadaaa! – one extra iteration does the job to really make the idea clear and compelling (you to act on it).

This is exactly what happened to me about the role of ‘questions’ in facilitation.

I’ve been puzzled by this for a while. To the extent that I posted a wicked question about it recently:

Yes: What is the place of questions in our practice?

The penny dropped when I listened to the latest episode of the Workshops Work podcast with no other than two friends of mine in a conversation: Myriam Hadnes (the WW podcast and NDB community founder) and Amanda Harding (the Convene owner).

As they were exploring the art of curating dialogue around wicked problems, Amanda explained despite her knowing the context in which she is curating dialogues, she didn’t see herself as the best qualified to decide what are the best questions to ask. Instead, she relied on the people joining the dialogues to come up with them.

Aha!!

So this is what suddenly became abundantly clear for me (at least for now):

In my humble opinion, and practice, the preeminent place of questions in our facilitation approach is to use our craft of exploring, playing with, reformulating, sharpening questions to understand the context of their group dynamics and relationships better, and to elicit better questions from the people in the room – the people who are intimate with the context at hand.

It is NOT about us asking the right, good, smart, definitive questions about the topic at hand.

This sits comfortably with me.

Until this point, I felt somewhat irked by the notion that questions are central to a facilitator’s practice.

Why my discomfort with questions?

Questions are certainly helpful. And powerful!

We – I mean ‘facilitators’ for short, even though I don’t look at myself as a facilitator – bring questions all the time, and should do some measure of that for sure.

How can we best land useful questions (photo credit: Jon Tyson / Unsplash)

However, as mentioned in the LinkedIn post, I’ve always felt that it wasn’t my place to ask the questions that the people need to grapple with. Because it’s their world. Their questions. Their answers. Their next questions. Their consequences. Their vision of where to go. Their capacity and their motivation to get there etc.

I just didn’t feel like playing the role of the smart external consultant that came to crack the problems for everyone.

Disguised as questions, our ideas may seem like they’re not setting the direction, but if you follow Myriam’s practice (revealed in the above-mentioned episode) you would never ask a question that you know the answer to… otherwise you are intentionally shaping the direction of the conversation.

So where do questions play a role in a facilitator’s approach?

That said, a few ideas for the role of questions in our facilitation approach, and a few caveats to my epiphany:

Questions are absolutely essential in process design

Yes! Process design is the realm of questions. It’s 9 why’s, Wicked Questions, but also who, what, where, when, how, and why again.

Process design is about asking questions with and to your client/partner to really get to the bottom of what it is they’re trying to crack or move forward with. Asking questions doesn’t provide the answers but delineates the boundaries of the set of conversations the group needs to be having (at least as a start).

I have a whole list of questions to ask in that process design phase: some are generic, most are specific to the context. I don’t hide the fact that it will take some time to go through all these questions. However, I’ve found that everyone is thankful for the time spent questioning things and understanding where the real issues might lie.

Whatever the question we ask (even questions about process, not content), we are influencing the group

I’m not blind to the fact that neutrality doesn’t exist.

Even though I want my role to be in the background, as a sherpa of our currently ending Liberating Journey, with a mandate to “support everyone to do their best thinking“, I am part of the system and am influencing the group as a whole too. And sometimes, as my mentor Thomas Lahnthaler would suggest, we influence the group intentionally, to provoke the status quo.

But personally, I try to refrain from doing so too much, because even if you see the solution many steps ahead of the group, if the group is not there by itself, at its own pace and with its very own dynamics, whatever change that might seem useful will not necessarily come at the right time and thus be rejected.

I want the people I serve to own their own change process.

So, though I’m still influencing them, I only choose to do as little of it as possible, and as consciously as possible, not least by working on myself.

Asking questions is a personal choice, not an identity marker

Everyone does what they want. To each their own.

Influencing the group dynamics with questions is only a move, not necessarily your ‘signature’ approach. And even if it’s your go-to move, it doesn’t mean you will ask questions in every situation…

Questions are just a move on a range of options (photo credit: Anne Nygård / Unsplash)

Community At Work sometimes refer to the facilitator’s ‘influencer-accommodator’ continuum. It means that at any given moment you can decide to actively influence the group (by e.g. changing the process, pausing the process to reflect on the meta level, teaching an element of group dynamics, asking a question about content, seeking other views etc.) or to accommodate to what’s unfolding (by e.g. remaining entirely passive, letting silence unfold for a longer time, just mirroring what people are saying etc.).

It’s a choice.

And it’s a choice that doesn’t define who you are. Oh, I’m pretty sure we all have a certain overall tendency to be rather actively intervening or actively observing what is happening instead. But every situation presents another opportunity to make a call, whatever it is.

Perhaps in a given situation I’ll let confusion settle down and see how the participants grapple with it; at at another moment I will come in and suggest we take a break, or reflect individually about it, or do something in breakouts about that confusion; and yet another time I may simply enter the confusion and use my active listening skills to help the group navigate that confusion together.

What’s become more vivid for me is that I’m focusing my questions on ‘meta questioning’

The art of ‘meta questioning’

There are thousands of references on Google about how to ask the right/strong/better/perfect questions so I won’t explore that. Here I am focusing on what I see as a useful questioning practice for facilitators.

When it comes to questions, what facilitators bring to a group is the art of ‘meta questioning’: asking questions about the meta world of the process, and asking questions about questions.

Process questions

Process questions are the obvious facilitator questions.

Instead of focusing on the topic at hand (what people hear), they are about what people see: setup, group dynamics, behaviours and communication, logistics, charts etc.

Asking these questions builds the group’s process literacy. The questions reveal the ‘process scaffolding’ that contains the group conversations. They help the group: sharpen its capacity to observe without analysing (what so what now what does wonders on this); acknowledge reactions, emotions, communication styles; understand what participation formats make possible, and understand that these formats are only one aspect of facilitation; come to make a decision together; register power relations, broken relations and relations in general; appreciate the time it takes to build emotional bridges and psychological safety between people etc.

Process questions could include:

• What are you observing in the room right now?
• What emotions are coming up for you at the moment?
• How are our relationships developing as we speak?
• What did you notice about the participation format/method/structure we just used?
• What does this conversation say about (y)our ability to progress as a group?
• What might be a useful move now to set up your group to a constructive next step?
• What has this conversation made possible for you?
• …

And in addition to all that, all the questions – and interventions – related to the specific role of the facilitator (to ensure everyone does their best thinking) ie. when someone is not being heard or supported, questions related to getting people on track with the conversation at hand (rather than following anyone’s rabbit hole) etc.

Questions about questions

This second type of ‘meta questions’ also belongs to process questions, just of another kind. Only this time, rather than looking at the ‘container’, they’re geared towards helping everyone sharpen their own questions.

Active listening, in all its shades, comes in handy here. Particularly paraphrasing and drawing people out, but also helping people understand each other.

Questions such as:

Questions that help the group process their own questions, that’s what I like (photo credit: Wonderlane / Unsplash)

• Am I hearing you say… [xyz]?
• Can someone here rephrase Adam’s question in their own words?
• Do you have anything else on your mind / to add here? (which as such doesn’t always lead to sharper questions but opens up new possibilities for better questions)
• Can you tell me more…?
• What aspect of the issue might have not yet manifested itself here?
• Does this question make sense to everyone here, and if not, what further clarity do you need?
• If you had to summarise your thought into a headline question, what would it look like?
• …

Methods like 9 why’s also come in handy here, but they focus specifically on the why, not on the whole matter…

You can also follow the ORID (Objective/Reflective/Interpretive/Decisional) question framework as suggested here, but that might put you back in the middle of the confusion about questions we ask ha ha ha.

On this introspective journey, I have learned that my attitude vis-à-vis questions is to limit them to questions that alert the group to the invisible aspects of the process, and to questions that help them better craft the questions they really need to come up with themselves.

Let me finish this post with a couple of TedxTalk videos about questions:

In the first one, Pia Lauritzen talks about the insidious power of questions, which speaks directly to this post…

In the second one, Andrew Vincent invites us to check that we disguise questions as statements, and focus on both the needs of the person you’re asking the question to (rather than your needs) and on avoiding the traps of Yes/No questions.

Where are your preferences and boundaries as a person who facilitates processes?

Related stories

• Sharpen your senses and reach (some) closure with ‘What so what now what’ (LS under the lens)
• (Structuring our liberation) Find answers, ideas, courage, comfort, challenge, connection through ‘Spiral Journal’
• Wicked Questions, /confusiasm/ and diverse richness at their best

Sharpen your senses and reach (some) closure with ‘What so what now what’ (LS under the lens)

(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 were not created to help with consensual decision-making.

That much I know from some of the pioneers themselves. And I’m actually waiting for an exciting session with our fellow Liberating Journey explorers on using LS to come to closure to blog about whether or not Liberating Structures can actually help reach closure.

But if there is one structure that is bound to help you and you group(s) reach some level of closure, it’s this one: What So What Now What.

What is the purpose of What So What Now What?

The LS website states: “Together, Look Back on Progress to Date and Decide What Adjustments Are Needed” (ha ha ha, with that annoying trend of capitalising all letters). Indeed ‘W3’, as it’s known in the LS world, can do that.

It can also do a few other things really nicely:

• It helps understand what just happened (What?)
• It helps everyone analyse the patterns and interesting ideas emerging (So what?)
• It helps get the group get ready for action (Now what?)
• Because of its logical structure and in-built filtering mechanism of What > So what > Now what, it helps actually come to closure towards a proposal that might itself lead to a sustainable outcome
• In the process – and to me this is perhaps the biggest value of W3 – it helps sharpen our senses in the ‘what’ phase. It forces us to ponder what our senses have registered, not what our mind is telling us. See more below…
• As a Liberating Structure, it uses small groups to go through these stages. In the process it reveals patterns of observations, insights and suggestions for action that the full group spans. Incidentally that is also the reason why W3 remains relatively clunky if you’re searching for something like a unanimous agreement, because this structure invites a wide diversity of opinions.

A key concept at the centre of What So What Now What is the ladder of inference. The analogy of the ladder also shows that strong action only follows good analysis, which itself again follows a grounded observation of ‘what is’. The less time you spend on observing, ie. the less you rely on the sensory data (‘what’ your senses have recorded), the more wobbly the ladder will be. And eventually your actions may not be grounded enough in the reality to lead to breakthroughs.

The ladder of inference is somehow also an inverted iceberg: what you observe is the emerged part, forming a strong basis for analysis. As you delve deeper, you get into the finer nuances of what a group is really aspiring to. The more diligently you take stock of all the observable data, the more you can surface different views, world views, cultures, preferences, etc. and as the image below suggests, avoid misunderstandings

The LS website also lists a number of other purposes for W3:

• Build shared understanding of how people develop different perspectives, ideas, and rationales for actions and decisions
• Make sure that learning is generated from shared experiences: no feedback = no learning
• Avoid repeating the same mistakes or dysfunctions over and over
• Avoid arguments about actions based on lack of clarity about facts or their interpretation
• Eliminate the tendency to jump prematurely to action, leaving people behind
• Get all the data and observations out on the table first thing for everyone to start on the same page
• Honor the history and the novelty of what is unfolding
• Build trust and reduce fear by learning together at each step of a shared experience
• Make sense of complex challenges in a way that unleashes action
• Experience how questions are more powerful than answers because they invite active exploration

How does it work?

There are various ways to work What So What Now What but at its simplest, here is how it works:

WHAT

• Individually, take a minute to recall everything you’ve observed with your senses: what you’ve heard, seen, and -why not- even smelled, touched and/or tasted (ie. the WHAT?)
• Then in a small group, share your individual observations with each other for 3-8 minutes
• Finally, with the whole group share your collective observations across all groups in whatever time seems relevant (the LS website suggests 3 minutes, which seems awfully short to me – I would go for 5-10 minutes if you want a collective sense of direction at the end of W3)

SO WHAT

• Again individually, take a minute to review what the group has observed as a whole, and tease out important patterns, insights, outlier thoughts, anything that resonates with you (ie. the SO WHAT?) and that seems important. And ask yourself: Why does that seem important?
• Then in a small group, share your individual insights with each other for 3-8 minutes
• With the whole group, share your group insights across all groups in whatever time seems adequate

NOW WHAT

• Finally, individually once more, you take a minute to tease out what actions seem to make sense (the NOW WHAT?)
• As in previous steps, share in a small group for 3-8 minutes
• And again in the whole group…

Mind that differentiating between observations and insights is rather difficult for some (most?) people and groups. Give examples. Perhaps double down on the fact that if something cannot be recorded by either of our 5 senses it’s not in the WHAT category but rather in the SO WHAT (or even NOW WHAT). The LS website offers an example of how to make these more distinct:

“Note that the expression of emotions can be observed as a “What” (e.g., “many people were smiling and laughing” rather than suggesting people were “happy” [which would be more of a so what item])“. You are invited to correct people and explain the differences between these stages, and to make sure the whole group doesn’t go too quickly over the WHAT phase, which is the most difficult (because largely untrained).

Who could really benefit from What So What Now What?

Much like the last LS I blogged about (Tiny Demons), W3 is for anyone, anywhere, anytime there is a point in pondering what is happening and anticipating the next phase…

I can imagine that particularly for the Scrum/Agile/Lean sprinters this structure makes sense as they go through a perpetual cycle of continuous improvement. But really any group that wants to take a pause to observe, reflect and infer next steps can put this structure to good use…

What is liberating about it?

I guess there are at least two things that are liberating about What So What Now What:

For one, it is indeed one of the few structures from the repertoire that are rather ‘convergent’ than ‘divergent’.

LS is all about liberating the voice of everyone, so it stems from a distinctly divergent drive. And as much as divergent thinking is a) necessary and b) really fun (and also c, d, e, f, g, h as there are many other nice features of divergent thinking) it is also frustrating at times to not seem to find any sense of direction.

That’s where a structure like W3 helps us feel closer to closure 😉

But again perhaps the most liberating part of W3 is that it sharpens our senses, continuously, so we can make sense of our reality based on a much higher, finer granularity of data.

That being said, the latter type of liberation only really comes once you have started sharpening these senses. It doesn’t come easy. We are so used to jumping into analysis, and to action, that staying at the level of observations is not a given, it’s a (self-)taught skill, which requires discipline and practice.

Maybe another liberating element of W3 is that it can be used as the go-to structure to debrief anything. This, in turn, helps continually sharpen our ability to observe, analyse and act.

How can it be stretched even further?

Like many LS, What So What Now What can be adapted in various ways. Here are a few suggestions that come to my mind:

• Do a turbo W3 e.g. 5 mins 5 mins 5 mins instead of the full sequence
• On the other hand, try an extended version of W3 to really harvest insights in the service of a ‘full group convergence’
• Based on the harvest of W3 across the groups, carry out another cycle of W3: one ‘integrative’ W3 sequence to get the whole group to the next stage. Build upon observations from the whole group, build on the analysis of the whole group, and finally decide which actions should emerge, based on the whole group. Perhaps segue the ‘Now What’ with Min Specs if you feel you’re still too deep in the laundry list (ie. too many items on the list of next steps)…
• Nest a 1-2-4-all inside each step to play with more structures at once, and with an added filtering mechanism
• Try more often to invite the group to just linger in the ‘WHAT’ phase so they can share what they’re seeing/hearing etc. This builds their muscle to use W3 well
• Online, using the chat to do this works wonders too, with everyone sharing their personal observations / insights / actions and discussing what emerges at every step as a group before getting into the next stage with their individual notes in the chat box
• For the WHAT part, invite a simple ethnographer to share a number of sense-able facts they have plucked out and about… and perhaps combine this with peoples’ individual observations, or get them on the other hand to analyse the data gathered by the simple ethnographer?

What riffs and variations have you tried with What So What Now What? Which have been helpful, which haven’t?

What so what now what (painting by Kandinsky)

So what now (what? 😉

Now what indeed?

Just give it a try, stretch it, embrace the ladder of inference, and test how well What So What Now What helps you and your groups to come to closure.

Whatever insights you have about this, I would love to hear it, as grist for the mill of my upcoming blog post on LS for closure and action…

Related stories

See other post in this ‘LS under the lens‘ blog series. And also:

• The Russian dolls of Liberating Structures: from chocolate box to Pandora’s box
• The enduring power of Liberating Structures, online, and outside of meetings

One secret sauce of successful (or wobbly) gatherings: the facilitator’s energy

How does our energy, as facilitators, show up in the room, and what are its consequences? (photo credit: Miguel Bruna / Unsplash)

This post has been coming for a while…

Yes, what is it about the energy of the facilitator(s) in the room?

Exactly like any facilitator typically brings their favourite repertoire, approaches, frameworks and their own ecosystem, they also bring a particular energy.

That energy uniquely affects the group.

Why I’m writing this post is related to exactly that: if there’s one positive thing that people in my groups have kept on saying consistently throughout the years about my presence, it is that I bring a lot of energy in the room – ie. to them.

I don’t mean to pry and shine here, I’m just interested in reflecting on energy.

That energy charge my people mentioned may be good, it may be bad. It probably depends on everyone’s preference. But there’s no denying that my energy affects others.

This made me ponder the notion that our energy is an important element, perhaps too easily overlooked by the fact that we (people facilitating) are supposed to be less visible, at least we’re not supposed to be in the lime light.

The energy a facilitator brings to the room

And let’s be clear, energy is not one simple, consistent thing. It takes various shapes or forms that heed attention in different ways:

• The abundant energy that keeps people on their toes – which I guess is what people referred to when speaking about me?
• The calm and clear energy with a rather slow diction that captures the attention of people (Michelle Howard comes to mind)
• The sharp and charismatic energy of someone who is clearly weighing their every word to make the deepest meaning of everything they say (Sam Kaner comes to mind)
• The wild and creative energy that is even mirrored in the dance-like body language of the facilitator (Fisher S Qua comes to mind)
• The quirky auntie ‘let me take you under my wings, and also challenge your thinking here’ energy that makes people feel entitled to think and explore more (Nancy White comes to mind)
• The warm energy of someone who is there to make everyone feel at ease and to imprint the relational nature of facilitation and the importance of presence in service of everyone else (Nadia von Holzen comes to mind)
• And I could name quite a few more…

These different energies tend to have a ripple effect on the participants (the ‘acticipants’ as I like to call them): It actually may give them extra energy; it may give them agency to feel they can be enthusiastic rather than cynical; it may keep them on their toes and curious; it can help them channel their thinking, their emotions, their experiences, their sense of themselves; it may make them feel good about themselves and about each other… in short it may spark off many positive effects.

Genuine care brings energy – to both people (photo credit: Aaron Blanco Tejedor / Unsplash)

What is clear, on the other hand, is that exactly like a public speaker bores everyone when they don’t feel passionate about their topic, a facilitator who looks like they’re just ‘going through the motions’ without ‘feeling’ what they are doing with the groups doesn’t invite their groups to do their best thinking.

Facilitators without energy? Not likely to happen…

Luckily I haven’t witnessed many facilitators without a distinct energy.

Energy-less facilitator? Hmm, I don’t think so – though it could happen (photo credit: Luis Villasmil / Unsplash)

There are good reasons for it:

• Facilitating keeps you on your toes because of all the things you have to keep track of (the specific communication on the moment by someone talking, the group dynamics, logistical information, time management, emerging insights that could affect the whole group, the next bit in the workshop etc.)
• Any work that is oriented towards serving others (as facilitation is) tends to make us feel good about ourselves, and thereby give us energy
• For me, the distinct ‘aha moment’ of when my acticipants metaphorically lift their head from their individual sand hole and level up to a collective endeavour, vision or aspiration is one of the biggest energy boosts that I get to experience through my work
• Even for ourselves, honing our facilitation skills is always a reason to keep our focus and energy about
• And in the worst case scenario, if the dynamics is slow, following a beaten track, not inspiring, our remit is anyhow limited in time which is reason enough to keep energy ha ha ha (though that’s really not a great situation)
• And for all these reasons I think being a collaboration/facilitation specialist is one of the best jobs in the world – and facilitation is not just restricted to the world of work but as a lifeskill too.

So it’s not so much the lack of energy that might be a problem here, but rather that the facilitator’s energy may affect the group in not-so-desirable ways…

How our energy can negatively impact the group

When our energy makes other people guilt trip… (photo credit: Studio Bloom / Unsplash)

Then of course there’s the risk of our energy taking too much place in the group dynamics, for instance when a facilitator’s playful energy bars the option to be serious and earnest.

Or when a facilitator’s charisma influences acticipants to mirror the facilitator’s stance rather than be themselves.

Or even when our positive energy might lead the way to toxic positivity (the feel good imperative).

The energy of a facilitator may also intimidate acticipants, make them feel energy-less, not in the mood, not capable…

So that energy is something to be aware of and to try to channel for the collective good.

The best sources of energy I’ve observed about facilitators

(photo credit: Simi Iluyomade / Unsplash)

In any case, what I have found to be universally truly positive elements of a facilitator’s energy are:

• Their belief (and self confidence) in their own principles
• Their authenticity (in whatever quirky personality traits they brought around) – keeping true to themselves and bringing their whole person into the room
• Their authentic curiosity and care for their groups – walking the talk of being helpful and supportive with EVERYONE
• Their flexibility and agility in embracing what’s emerging – responding to what is alive rather than cruising on with a predetermined plan
• Their focus on both the objectives and the group dynamics and relationships, holding both in balance, as well as front and centre…

What does that say about cultivating our energy when we facilitate?

So let’s try, as people who facilitate, to be mindful of the gifts and curses of our energy, to preserve healthy levels of it and to still tune it to the group’s needs and individuals’ genuine selves…

What, in your experience, has the energy of a facilitator made either possible, or difficult? What else have you noticed about their energy?

Related stories

• How you show up as a facilitator, with all the ‘micro-ecosystem’ you bring along
• How to gain confidence as a facilitator
• The power of ‘will’, how we (can avoid to) sabotage our way to our own greatness

The Russian dolls of Liberating Structures: from chocolate box to Pandora’s box

It’s perhaps not a surprise that the logo of Liberating Structures is a box (it looks like a box with some fizzy stars popping out, see image on the left).

Indeed in my experience – nearly 10 years of working with that incredible repertoire – Liberating Structures are not just a box but a set of boxes nested in each other.

Like Russian dolls.

Matryoshka dolls (photo credit: Iza Gawrych / Unsplash)

As you progress in your knowledge and practice with the repertoire, you discover other boxes inviting you to go deeper and find out more.

Let’s inspect this Russian dolls set, shall we?

First stage: the chocolate box

What chocolate will you get with the LS box? (photo credit: Chocolate Cherry Kisses / Quote: Forrest Gump 😉

As per Forrest Gump‘s description, the first time you discover Liberating Structures, it feels like a chocolate box: what you’re gonna get is a mystery.

A puzzle, even.

The ‘liberating’ part is instinctively attractive. The ‘structure’ part resonates with some. And the apparent paradox of liberating AND structure (you got it, it’s a wicked question 🙃) raises the eyebrows of most people. Intriguing!

The very wording of Liberating Structures is shrouded with mystery. The language of Liberating Structures (LS) is specific, colourful, and a bit of an acquired taste.

“Loving provocation”, “wicked question”, “integrated autonomy”, “Min Specs”, “punctuation”, “stringing”… all these terms, and more, bring about a definite sense of something special about LS that makes you want to know more.

And then again, it can also be rather off-putting.

When I first came across Liberating Structures I had a distinct feeling of coming across a cult, of a community with a higher sense of themselves, some pretentiousness that didn’t sit well with me.

But I stuck around, my curiosity piqued…

The peculiar LS language is one of the reasons why a lot of LS practitioners, following the principle of ‘Believe before you see’, tend to introduce LS without introducing that language. This way allows people to experience the power of LS first, and only then understand/see the point of it.

In any case, this first box might feel a little uncomfortable (which may have been intended by the LS pioneers). Its chocolates feel uninviting to some.

But still, you can’t resist, there’s just too much playfulness there to unravel.

So then you get to ‘do‘ Liberating Structures, and you come across the second nested box…

Second stage: the tool box

LS are often experienced first as a toolbox (photo credit: Alexander Schimmeck / Unsplash)

When people try and get familiar with some Liberating Structures – usually the simple ones such as 1-2-4-all (which was recently hailed on LinkedIn as the MVP of Liberating Structures) or Impromptu Networking – they tend to look at the LS repertoire as a ‘toolbox’.

“It’s a great toolbox!”

“I know this structure, though I’ve used it under another name”

“Well, it’s just another box of tricks”

These are some of the things I’ve heard by people that perhaps gave LS too brief a look.

And indeed, the LS pioneers (Keith and Henri the creators, and Fisher, Anna, Nancy and various others) have neatly repackaged other participation formats such as Open Space Technology, TRIZ or Spiral Journal, systematically superposing their five design elements.

Credit to the original inventors of these formats. And credits to the LS folks for unifying them under the LS banner with a logic!

Now though, even for people that have been using half or more of the original 33 structures (or some of the many others that are in development), for a while LS still feel like a useful box of tools to pull groups to do all kinds of things.

There’s nothing wrong with that. LS ARE great tools and they’re all in a box.

But that’s only half of the story.

Leaving our experience of LS at the toolbox stage is a hugely missed opportunity… because the next two boxes are simply AMAZING…

Third stage: the magic box

After a while, you debrief with yourself and others about LS, you delve deeper into the repertoire and its DNA, and you start seeing the much deeper power of Liberating Structures.

All of a sudden a magic box unveils itself in front of your eyes (Photo credit: Elena Mozhvilo / Unsplash)

You discover the magic of stringing: pairing LS to serve a given outcome e.g. doing Ecocycle planning > What So What Now What > 15% solutions to help everyone make sense of their personal priorities around their activities.

You start nesting (including a structure into another one) LS. For instance you include 1-2-4-all as part of the Ecocycle planning analysis…

You start understanding and adopting the language or even ‘grammar’ of Liberating Structures. You start feeling its DNA baked in complexity thinking.

You start seeing that what seemed like a toolbox is endlessly more modular and powerful than that. You begin to contemplate, and imagine, the incredible applications for LS.

From that knowledge box, LS turn into a magic box with incredible versatility. It may be that you even start to use the language, the lenses, and the structures of LS to your personal life.

You realise that a boundless amount of situations invite LS naturally and that doing so unlocks what seemed to be stuck forever.

And that’s where for me the penny dropped:

“Liberating Structures allow us to go deep, fast!”

(yours truly ;))

Indeed, you experience the profound changes that LS conjures up: challenging power; helping people to find their voice, presence and agency; inviting us to embrace paradox and ‘confusiasm‘; challenging us to say NO and to engage in less distraction of the ‘nice-to-have’ variety (so that we do MORE of what we are supposed to do); lovingly provoking our peers because feedback with care is incredibly powerful; seeing our activities and relationships dynamically, not statically, and connected at multiple levels…

Feedback loops appear everywhere then, and the magical world of LS becomes a reality, an entrancing reality!

You start really believing in the power of LS, but individually, without any guru telling you what to do.

You are bought into it. All by yourself.

It can even escalate to the stage where that magic may prove annoying: you see that LS invite themselves in so many of your ideas, process designs etc. (but like a little too systematically) because they are so versatile. And yet Liberating Structures don’t serve all purposes equally well. They can even be rather clunky or even horrible for certain pursuits, but that’s a topic for another post.

It might be the end of your exploration of LS?

…But then… if you’re up for it, there’s another – final? – box nested in the magic box…

Fourth (last?) stage: Pandora’s box

When you have seen how Liberating Structures revolutionises the way people talk with each other and collaborate, you can be inclined to do a lot more with it, to actually ‘deploy’ LS at a collective level.

You want more people to experience this clarity, the graciousness of LS in revealing patterns, this heightened sense of agency they bring about and the ruthless realism they impose on our visions.

It’s the Pandora box stage: in a way, you can no longer look at the world without some of the LS lens.

You cannot unsee what you have seen.

And then LS turn into Pandora’s box, with a profound potential for our society at large (Image credit: ??) And by the way I don’t mean the Pandora box in the negative sense, but in relation to its ubiquitous power

At this stage, you are grounded in the spirit of ‘creative destruction’ and its pursuit of Min Specs. You plan your ecocycle of activities and relationships because it gives you a much more realistic view of how things are moving around you; you embrace the micro-macro complexity of Panarchy in your work – and life; you relate to the future in both your aspirations towards it and your embrace of multiple futures with Critical Uncertainties. And so much more!

LS becomes an influential philosophy. With a universal potential. One that you want to share with as many people as you can because it’s so worth it, and you’ve seen others get elated by this journey too!

That collective unleashing of energies is what I’m grappling with. And I’m pretty sure it’s not the end stage either…

Having read all this, don’t think I’m seeing everything through the lens of Liberating Structures. I definitely don’t see them as a be-all-end-all solution. But the vastness of their applications and their ability to unlock complex issues fast is, in my experience, unparalleled and good enough a reason to invite everyone to try them and make up their mind for themselves!

So if you haven’t yet experienced all these levels, how about you ponder this with a few friends and run a 1-2-4-all about it, or inspect it by yourself or in a group with What So What Now What? Or even join our next immersion workshop (see PS).

I’m curious how your box of chocolates tastes, and what other boxes you might have come across…

Perhaps these LS chocolates taste even better with a shot of vodka – as a thankful wink to the LS matryoshkas 😝

PS. Feel free to join our next immersion workshop. We just released a ‘tiny booklet’ (LinkedIn link) which explains what we do in an immersion, following these nested dolls: Discover > do > debrief > deploy.

You may also wish to join our next Liberating Journey (for more advanced LS practitioners). The latter is not yet on offer, but you can always signal your interest already as we’ll make it happen again this year!).

Related stories

• See more posts about Liberating Structures
• Some introspection about what ‘Liberating Structures’ are to me, and a little more…
• Multiple facets of Liberating Structures: interview snippets with Anna Jackson

Soul searching, ‘signature’ and services: my dragon year (2024) in perspective

Happy 2024!

May this year – which will be the year of the dragon according to far Eastern calendars – bring you health, happiness and success, exactly in that order!

Being a native dragon myself, I hope this year will indeed be as spectacular as the past 2 dragon years I’ve had. However, last time I hailed the advent of a new year that year turned out to be the worst year of my entire life and by a long distance. So here’s cautious hoping.

Having done a bit of introspection at the end of last year to ponder what happened on this blog and in my practice, I finally completed this cycle over this very weekend, to reflect on myself, my practice and all the things that are vibrant for me this year. Some soul searching, a dash on my facilitation signature and a sharper sense of the services I provide, all reflected in my updated Process Change website.

Here’s an overview, I hope you find some value in it – it’s introspective, personal, and shared in the spirit of ‘working out loud‘ and inviting you to share more of yourself too.

Upon reading this post, feel free to contact me (see contact page) to bounce ideas, find support, or feel free as ever to engage with my posts here and on LinkedIn.

Soul searching – where am I at?

Doing a bit of inner reflection is always useful. So I did and here’s what’s coming up for me in 2024:

Refreshing my 9 why’s and my purpose statement

Using the 9 why’s (Liberating) structure, I have updated my purpose statement to something crisper:

I help and challenge everyone unlock their collaborative, facilitative, relational magic towards better human systems and/or planet.

I do this through direct facilitation and coaching/training/co-design and co-facilitation of heart-driven, ambitious collectives.

(myself 😉

Doubling down on process literacy (an active component of developing everyone’s leadership and agency)

The purpose statement is my Ikigai and it is clear that developing everyone’s collaboration/process literacy is what I’m here to do. So here’s to helping unlock everyone’s magic (one of my keywords for 2024) to see, understand, speak and use process for effective, healthy and enjoyable collaborations.

This also means I’ll keep working on unpacking what ‘process literacy’ means (as I did in the Workshops Work podcast episode of Myriam Hadnes). And I’ll do it among others in the parallel work sessions with my mate and accountability buddy Linda Howard.

Reorganising myself and my client list accordingly

Part of that soul searching also involved organising myself very practically. And it may sound anal or superficial – I don’t really care, mind you – but I’m super happy to have cracked the overview of the 5 areas of developing my practice so that I can serve my ikigai best:

• Business development and acquisition (soul and client searching)
• Administrative and financial management
• Marketing, promotion and social media
• Website management and blogging
• Personal development

Following advice from Martin Garbers I have now also dedicated slots to develop my business every other week and to focus on either of these 5 areas. Let’s see where this leads.

(Photo credit: Cytonn photography / Unsplash)

And it may look funny that I include my client acquisition here and not under promotion, but the people I serve are a close part of the ecosystem of my practice, and what’s dawning on me this year is that I want to serve in particular:

• Any person, team, company, network that has some basic understanding of collaboration/process, at least knowing that for instance someone who facilitates is not (just) a time keeper, is not a chair, is not an MC (read more about the differences here). This is something which I realised through my involvement in the ever excellent Never Done Before community of facilitators.
• New clients, especially corporate clients that have the heart in the right place and are ready to unlock new opportunities. I’m thinking in particular of Foundations that are using private money to do some good, and also convening bodies that could do with being challenged in their practice, which leads me to the next chapter…

About my (facilitation) signature… How do I come across?

Tickled by Myriam and Thomas‘s signature bootcamp training workshop, I also reflected on what my facilitation signature.

Learn more about facilitation signature – oh and by the way this bootcamp is over but more will come!

Even though I don’t consider myself a facilitator – rather a collaboration specialist and ‘process agent provocateur’ that uses facilitative skills to unlock peoples’ and groups’ magic – I do facilitate a lot and it’s indeed useful to realise what is my unique signature, added value in a space that is increasingly crowded out.

What is dawning on me is that I’m a walking paradox and it’s great because it means I can adapt to a wider range of situations and characters. This is what I mentioned about my signature on my website:

There are many people cultivating collaboration and facilitation skills out there. What makes me distinct from them: I am a process agent provocateur. I am there to reveal and work with the paradoxes of ‘real life’. It translates as:

• I cultivate both business objectives and interpersonal relationships;
• I am driven by high level philosophies and values and I am at the same time ruthlessly pragmatic;
• I create spaces for my clients to feel comfortable and psychologically safe, so they can at the same time be brave and dip out of their comfort zone (where learning, and magic happens);
• I create grand experiences that reveal entirely new worlds to my clients – and at the same time I am happiest when focusing on the little details and the ‘everyday, mundane, magic’ that anyone can see and use;
• I serve clients that have a heart and a soul – and at the same time I can help anyone who wishes to simply strengthen their collaborative/process muscles;
• I love onsite meetings for the energy and options that they provide, and for the extra bit of relationship building that happens ‘in real life’ and yet at the same time I savour online gatherings as an incredible gift to conveniently work together and allow everyone’s voice and contributions to come to the fore in different ways…
• But perhaps most importantly, while I’m here to serve clients and help them achieve their objectives, at the same time I challenge them with much ‘loving provocation’ to consider different options and to rethink what they’re setting out to do. In the process, I don’t shy away from ‘difficult conversations’ in the spirit of finding the crux of the matter.

What do you think?

Services – what can I do (for YOU and all)?

It was only the next logical step to reflect on the services that I provide. They are updated and reflected in the services page of my website.

Here, however, I want to specifically emphasise three services that I want to focus more specifically on in 2024:

Coaching people to unlock their collaborative, facilitative, relational magic

I have been coaching others for many years. Only very informally and almost systematically for free. I have realised, however, that by systematically coaching people informally a) I don’t actually create the best conditions for my coachees to benefit from it the most, because the informal nature means it may be less structured and woven more with other conversation bits etc. and b) I use time that I cannot dedicate to helping others more systematically. And on top of it, when people pay for services, they also care more about what they ask, what they want to get. This is a win-win and one that I want to emulate more, because I do think I have a lot of experience in collaboration, communication, facilitation, process design, and I would love to share this passion and expertise with anyone and everyone.

Getting back to ‘Group facilitation skills’ training

I have had a hiatus of several years without giving this training course – originally and still provided by Community At Work (C@W) in their San Francisco office (or elsewhere at clients) and online. I owe soooo much to C@W and making this training a reality in 2024 would be the most amazing step for me to resume this amazing collaboration and to unleash this foundational and ground-breaking training course on whoever wants to harness the most solid facilitation skill basics they need to have towards consensus-based group decision-making. So wish me luck in putting this on its rails and let me know if you’d love to join it! When I experienced it as a participant, it totally transformed my own practice, rewiring my brain on my facilitation practice. If it was so shockingly profound for me, there’s good chances it could do something similar to you!

Beyond training, doing more ‘Liberating Journeys’

And then again I still remain a training skeptic (gotta blog about it beyond this). Because a training course is not a ticked box, it’s a tick to get you started on a journey. Practice, honing skills, that is the journey and it serves a higher purpose…

We started our first Liberating Journey in the last quarter of 2023 and it has proven as rich, ‘leerzaam’ (full of learning) and inspiring as I could hope for, and more. I will definitely blog about it when it’s over in March, and another liberating journey is very likely to see the light in the later part of 2024. But in any case, if you already have some experience with Liberating Structures and actually want to use the repertoire to effect change, then contact me because this might just be what you need!

What’s next for you? You can help!

Reading all of the above, what is coming up for you?

In any case, I can use your help: Please contact me if I can help you or anyone who might benefit from my services, approach etc.

And also please share with me any contact details of people working for Foundations, corporate clients with a heart (while I will always serve a majority of not-for-profit and public entities), and convening bodies that need to get better at… err… convening!

On that note, again let me wish you a fantastic year of the dragon, may your life and work take a flight at an even higher altitude and may you feel blessed by all the magic of every moment on this planet and with other living creatures…

Related stories

• 2023 retrospective: What’s been vibrant on my blog and in my practice
• ‘Facilitation’ as a life skill – another amazing reason to invest in it
• Itinerary of a (meeting) change maker
• Looking behind the veil – the little nooks and crannies of process literacy
• New aspirations for new world, new me, new we, new then…