IntroductionPreview the LS book here. Color and B&W versions available on Amazon. Translations available in eight languages. Learn how simple rules can unleash a culture of innovation.

 

When you feel included and engaged, do you do a better job? Do you think teams in which people work well together produce much better results? Have you noticed the best ideas often come from unexpected sources?  Do you want to work at the top of your intelligence and give the same opportunity to others?

If YES, we have found this is the kind of organization and community that people want to be part of. AND, Liberating Structures help make it happen.

So why is it that so many organizations of all stripes are filled with disengaged workers, dysfunctional groups and wasted ideas?

Lofty aims to include and unleash everyone in shaping the future

While there will always be some justification for blaming leaders (or professors and administrators in education), the more compelling and useful explanation is not that people involved are bad, stupid or incompetent, but rather that the practices they have all learned are neither adapted to today’s realities nor designed to achieve the ideals listed above.

Unwittingly, the conventional structures used to organize how people routinely work together stifle inclusion and engagement.

Conventional structures are either too inhibiting (presentations, status reports and managed discussions) or too loose and disorganized (open discussions and brainstorms) to creatively engage people in shaping their own future. They frequently generate feelings of frustration and/or exclusion and fail to provide space for good ideas to emerge and germinate. This means that huge amounts of time and money are spent working the wrong way. More time and money are then spent trying to fix the unintended consequences.  

Liberating Structures start with something so simple and essential as not to seem worth doing and end with something so powerful and profound that it hardly seems possible.

A liberating repertoire of 33 methodsThis website offers an alternative way to approach and design how people work together. It provides a menu of thirty-three Liberating Structures to replace or complement conventional practices.

Liberating Structures used routinely make it possible to build the kind of organization that everybody wants. They are designed to include everyone in shaping next steps.

Liberating Structures introduce tiny shifts in the way we meet, plan, decide and relate to one another. They put the innovative power once reserved for experts only in hands of everyone. 

This alternative approach is both practical and feasible because Liberating Structures are quite simple and easy to learn. They can be used by everyone at every level, from the executive suite to the grassroots. No lengthy training courses or special talents are required. Mastery is simply a matter of practice. LS routinely unleash a vast reserve of contributions and latent innovations waiting to be discovered.

VIDEO: see one Liberating Structure "TRIZ" introduced to a group of doctors, managers, innovators

Every person interested in leading change—in schools, hospitals, foundations, agencies, and businesses—can use Liberating Structures to generate innovation and great results.  

Liberating Structures are easy-to-learn microstructures that enhance relational coordination and trust. They quickly foster lively participation in groups of any size, making it possible to truly include and unleash everyone. Liberating Structures are a disruptive innovation that can replace more controlling or constraining approaches.

 

Click on any Liberating Structure below. 

 

Leaders know that they would greatly increase productivity and innovation if only they could get everyone fully engaged. The challenge is how. Liberating Structures are novel, practical and no-nonsense methods to help you accomplish this goal with groups of any size.

Liberating Structures spark inventiveness by minimally structuring the way we interact while liberating content or subject matter. Very simple constraints unleash creative adaptability, generating better than expected results. Individual brilliance and collective wisdom are unbridled. Such a dramatic shift cannot be THAT simple, engaging, and powerful but it is. Read Getting Started if you are ready to liberate yourself.

By design, Liberating Structures distribute control so that participants can shape direction themselves as the action unfolds.

Learning Events

Immersion workshops are a great way to get started. Like a foreign language immersion course that temporarily relocates you away from a familiar culture, a LS immersion experience is a very effective way to learn. There are no presentations, facilitated discussions, status reports, brainstorming sessions, or open discussions. Only Liberating Strucutres are practiced. Organizing a workshop for people in your working group can accelerate "fluency."

Check out News and Events for more immersion workshops and LS User Group meetings.  Subscribe to LS News & get access to archives here.

 

 

Liberating Structures are immeasurably practical.  Our world is increasingly complex, interdependent, and culturally diverse.  Many of our most pressing challenges cut across geographic, cultural, and technical boundaries.  Simple methods that help us work together productively are central to making progress.

Helpful Analogies

Like Wikipedia, LS create simple rules to guide and liberate everyone’s contributions. Wikipedia’s must-dos and must-not dos specify how anyone can write articles, edit content, reach consensus about the facts, and share with attribution. This structure makes it possible for a diverse community to generate and sustain accurate content that compares favorably with professionally edited encyclopedias. Like Wikipedia, LS is a disruptive innovation in regard to how we engage people in organizations.

Like improv jazz, LS sparks freedom that arises from shared understanding of simple rules. Great jazz comes from playing creatively within the context of melodic and harmonic structure.  Like water in a river, LS takes the shape of the banks that it touches: adapting a similar pattern at every scale and in each local setting.

 

Below: watch this inspired video by Professor Arvind Singhal talking about liberating education and the role of changemakers.  UnScripTED: Liberating Structures 

Read this practical article "Tiny Tweaks That Help You Use LS" by Barry Overeem.  

Simple Ways to Engage Everyone on Zoom: Learn Several Liberating Structures in 30 minutes from Media Changemakers on Vimeo.

Unscripted #2 Liberating Structures with Dr. Arvind Singhal from Media Changemakers on Vimeo.

 

Lisa Gill is a fabulous writer and top drawer interviewer. Her Leadersmorphosis series dives deeply into self organizing @ work. Put your ear to this interivew she conducts with Henri and Keith.

Below, enjoy scenes from the LCJP Restorative Justice Summit.  Liberating Structures were used to organize a three day event full of learning, designed to advance the Restorative Justice movement. Restorative Justice (RJ) aims to create communities in which people feel safe by carefully structuring opportunities for offenders to make amends and victims to regain their personal power. Restorative Justice practitioners found Liberating Structures to be highly structured, liberating better than expected results.

2012 CO RJ Summit Video from LCJP on Vimeo.

LS were used to design the Transformation of Nursing summit. Coalitions from all 50 states and DC came together to advance the cause. 

For the United Nations ITC-ILO, Henri and Keith offered a Liberating Structures immersion workshop and follow-up consulting sessions. (The Centre is in Turin Italy.) The focus was how to organize for promoting decent work and sustainable development by not over-helping but rather facilitating networked self-organization.

The 10 LS Principles (short form)

 

 

 

Ten Principles 

 

While the individual LS microstructures are powerful separately, they function as an interrelated set which can transform an entire organization. The LS repertoire is inspired by ten liberating principles.

When we decide we belong together, LS principles help to guide behavior and leadership actions. Detailed descriptions here. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Surprising Power of Liberating Structures book!  Preview and buy on Amazon.  The color paperback ($49.95 USD), black&white ($19.95 USD) and e-book are now available on the Amazon website. Amazon offers deep discounts and free shipping to some customers.  

 

 

 

 

 

The development team at Holisticon is happy to announce that the Liberating Structures App is now available in the Google Play and Apple App Stores. A deep bow to their creative genius. Happy downloading!

Audio: A very playful Brave New Work podcast with Aaron Dignan and Rodney Evans.  On Liberating Structures with Lorenz Sell of Sutra and Keith. Lorenz asks the deepest questions about collective intelligence, generativity, and complexity science. (50 minutes)  Coaching Zone Podcast with Keith and Dr. Krister Lowe. The focus is on how leaders and teams can develop more productive habits with LS. [45 minutes]  Radio Interview with Meisha Rouser, organizational psychologist. The focus is on groups working at the top of their intelligence and imagination.  And a third podcast interview with Amiel Handelsman that dips into specific LS microstructures and their use by groups to generate innovative cultures. [60 minutes].

Check out Falling Off the Horse while faciliating & leading with Liberating Structures. This article by Keith McCandless describes a personal path forward. It includes what is possible to stop doing when LS is integrated into your practice.

LS are inspired by complexity science. Listen to this entertaining RadioLab program on Emergence to learn about some of the underlying concept of complexity science.  

 

LS User Groups (inventing and enlivening a new way to organize)

Open Letter from a Grateful Student to All Educators

Rhapsody for Strings!One of nine strings illustrated in "Rhapsody for Strings." A large array of topics and challenges are addressed. PDF here.

Below: early LS users and co-developers in Latin America, Europe, Canada and the USA.