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.
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
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 š) 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
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.
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.
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 š
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!).
agilefacil 
Leave a comment