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
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
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.
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.
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!
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.
agilefacil 
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