My first experiences with Liberating Structures and Metimeter.com

Engaging people is a driver for me

Ever since I work, attending meetings is a part of my life. Most of the time I feel that not everyone is engaged – contributions are limited to the “usual suspects” and listening to the more silent people is not happening. That’s why I am seeking for quite some time for alternatives to make things better – getting people engaged.

One of the many lessons I learnt from my WorkingOutLoud (WOL) journey (certainly one of the next blog entry, stay tuned) is that everyone has a contribution and wants to contribute. And how powerful CoCreation can be when all persons lean in.

Another lesson comes from my facilitator training of the Lego ® Serious Play ® Method (LSP), it follows a very basic idea: After building a model to answer a question, the builder explains what’s behind his model. In this phase every other participants is listening. So a deeper common understanding is reached and sometimes it triggers new thoughts and ideas in the audience.

How I learnt liberating structures

I came across liberating structures (LS)  through contributions of my network on Twitter and LinkedIn. There is a very active meetup community in Hannover, Germany. The reactions to the contributions were great.

So I ordered THE book about liberating structures: “The Surprising Power of Liberating Structures: Simple Rules to Unleash A Culture of Innovation” by Henri Lipmanowicz and Keith McCandless. In the book as well as on the website the 33 liberating structures are explained and how they can be combined to a “string“.

What I liked from the beginning is that the structures goal is to engage everyone in a meeting by distributing the air time of all participants in an equal way and that they can be used for groups small as well as huge groups (2… hundreds).

My first usage in meetings

For the start I used one of the basic structures 1-2-4-All  in two meetings.

The goal of the first meeting was to collect all tasks beyond the standard role within a group of 30 people. After 20 minutes 54 tasks were discussed, went through a repeat and rethink cycle and finally were collected on a meta plan wall.

One thing I observed in the room during the 1-2-4-All was, that some people didn’t start getting engaged, they even managed to not participate in the next phase, but when the discussion between two of the two persons group (Phase 1-2-4-All) happed they were actively pulled in.

After the meeting I got a feedback that we could have managed to do this offline by e-mail and would have saved a lot time. Another feedback was that it was helpful to first think on you own and then discuss in the following rounds.

The goal of the second meeting was to collect the expectations of all 33 participants of a workshop about µC resources in order to help the two experts during their presentations.  To close the loop, I requested everyone to bring their cellular phones into the workshop, that we can have a feedback round via Mentimeter at the end of the meeting.

Collection of the expectations was done in 20 minutes by usage of 1-2-4-All.  20 points which were important for the audience were collected (all double feedbacks were filtered by the 1-2-4-All). After the presentations the audience participated in an online feedback round. Two questions were asked, first Were your expectations fulfilled? You could select between yes and no. The second was Which things were relevant for your daily work? 3 feedbacks from each participant were possible, visualization was done with a word cloud.

I was quite happy with the result – 18 out if 23 expectations were met and we could shortly discuss with the 3 out of 4 persons, about the reason for their feedback (1 person stayed anonymous). And the word cloud was showing the two major points and tool names.

One observation I made was that the participants were engaged and energetic during the 1-2-4-All, during the presentations this was gone. My learning was that you should stay with liberating structures during a workshop.

My way ahead with liberating structures and interactive feedback

For future meetings and workshops I will more and more use and combine liberating structures. Looking forward to find out which strings work together. Two colleagues in my perimeter are already infected with LS and I hope that we start a community of practice (CoP) soon and my first participation in the Stuttgart Meetup group Liberating Structures is scheduled for the 9th of June.

And I love the interactive feedback – Mentimeter will be used more.

If the post is helpful for you please like and comment, if you have some points for me to improve, please comment as well.

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