Liberating Structures — the secret toolkit for meetings
“I think that’s the single largest source of optimization for a company: the makeup of their meetings.” — Daniel Ek, Co-Founder of Spotify
Have you ever had a meeting where you had a great contribution to the discussion, but couldn’t speak up?
Have you ever wanted to generate innovative ideas in your team but not know how to do it?
Have you ever had a meeting where it feels like you are stuck talking about the same failed solutions to problems?
I’m sure all of the above situations have happened to those working in software delivery. Teams are often faced with the need to come up with a new solution to a difficult technical or process problem they are currently facing. Recently, my team was trying to decide the new architectural design for a service, a typical technical discussion where we are looking at many different solutions that are important to the team’s future success. There are competing viewpoints in the team, and coming to a conclusion is critical.
I am one of those who can fall into the trap of allowing too much open discussion, which does not lead to useful outcomes. As a result, I have to come up with a better structure in order to get better outcomes. Little did I know that a toolkit of processes is already available, supported by an active community — Liberating Structures.
Liberating Structures is a freely available set of 33 simple structures that can be used to guide conversation in order to make sure everyone is engaged and contributing ideas, leading to better outcomes. The interesting belief that underpins Liberating Structures is that people want to contribute or generate ideas, but the structure of these discussions prevents them from doing so.
The Liberating Structures are incredibly simple, taking less than 5 minutes to understand. This simplicity helps to ensure you can experiment with these structures without too much investment.
Here are a few of my favourite structures, and where they could be used:
This structure provides a nice blend of self-reflections and sharing with the group. The session starts with each person reflecting on the challenge and thinking of potential solutions. These are then discussed in pairs. The best idea is then shared in a four, before the best idea then being shared with all. This is easily done remotely using Zoom breakout rooms.
This limits the number of ideas shared to everyone to a handful of the best that have survived some Evolutionary Darwinism, and allows for more thoughtful discussion. It also ensures that everyone has at least a chance to share an idea within a pair.
Often when coming up with ideas, we go for the best solution, regardless of how difficult it may be and the dependencies that are needed to implement it. The ‘15% solutions’ structure gets everyone to instead note the actions they could take now to improve the solution by 15%, regardless of what the ultimate end-goal will be. This bias for action and change of mindset generates interesting ideas.
I would encourage all agile delivery professionals to look at these structures and see what they can use. What is also surprising for such a simple set of tools is there is an active community around these both in terms of in-person meetups and online Slack conversations.
I would like to thank Paul Grew at Agility.im for bringing this toolkit to my attention so that I can now share it with you! Please let me know your experiences with Liberating Structures, and what you found useful.
