Liberating Structures

Including and Unleashing Everyone

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Design StoryBoards – Basic

Define Step-by-Step Elements for Bringing Meetings to Productive Endpoints (25-70 min.)

What is made possible? The most common causes of dysfunctional meetings can be eliminated: unclear purpose or lack of a common one, time wasters, restrictive participation, absent voices, groupthink, and frustrated participants. The process of designing a storyboard draws out a purpose that becomes clearer as it is matched with congruent microstructures. It reveals who needs to be included for successful implementation. Storyboards invite design participants to carefully define all the micro-organizing elements needed to achieve their purpose: a structuring invitation, space, materials, participation, group configurations, and facilitation and time allocations. Storyboards prevent people from starting and running meetings without an explicit design. Good designs yield better-than-expected results by uncovering tacit and latent sources of innovation.

Five Structural Elements – Min Specs

1. Structuring Invitation

Invite a design team (a representative subset of the group) to create a detailed plan, including visual cues, for how participants will interact to achieve their purpose

2. How Space Is Arranged and Materials Needed

An open wall with tapestry paper or flip-chart pages
2-by-4-inch Post-its and/or Liberating Structures Playing Cards
A blank storyboard (create a spreadsheet like the one illustrated above)

3. How Participation Is Distributed

Everyone involved in the design and planning of the meeting has an equal opportunity to contribute

4. How Groups Are Configured

1-2-All or 1-All in rapid cycles for each step below

5. Sequence of Steps and Time Allocation

Clarify the purpose of your work together (use Nine Whys if needed). 2 to 5 min.
Describe the standard approach or microstructure you would normally use for this session (including who is normally present) and assess how it succeeds and fails in achieving the stated purpose. 5 to 10 min.
Reexamine and strengthen the purpose statement if needed. 2 to 5 min.
Reexamine and decide who needs to participate or be involved. 2 to 5 min.

Brainstorm alternative microstructures (both conventional and Liberating Structures) that could achieve the purpose. Determine whether the purpose can be achieved in one step. If not, what must be the purpose of the first step? Continue with first step only. 5 to 10 min.

Determine which microstructures are best suited to achieving the purpose; choose one plus a backup. 2 to 10 min.
Decide who will be invited and who will facilitate the meeting. Enter all your decisions in the blank storyboard. 2 to 10 min.
Determine the questions and process you will use to evaluate your design (e.g., Did the design achieve desired outcomes? Did the group work together in a productive way? Does something new seem possible now? Use What, So What, Now What?) 2 to 5 min.
If multiple steps are needed, confer with the design team and arrange a meeting to work on an Advanced Design StoryBoard (see description below). 5 to 10 min.

WHY? Purposes

Evoke a purpose that is clear for all
Make the work in meetings productive and enjoyable for all
Give everyone a chance to make contributions
Foster synergy among participants
Help everyone find his or her role by making the design process visible
Reveal the weaknesses of the current practice and step up from it
Tap all the sources of knowledge for innovation (explicit, tacit, latent/emergent)

Tips and Traps

Encourage and seriously play with fast iterations; repeat and deepen your design
At a minimum, work in pairs (a second set of eyes and ears really helps) or small groups
Use icons and sketches to quickly develop shared understanding and actionable ideas
Always include a design debrief (What, So What, Now What?)
Don’t skimp on the time necessary to generate a good design. A good design will reduce wasted meeting time by much more than it took to create it. A bad design will generate frustration.

Riffs and Variations

Use the same approach to map ethnographic observations of a current practice
Use a pie chart to illuminate and balance the goals and flow of your design

Examples

For management meetings of all stripes
Project reviews
Classroom sessions
Brainstorming sessions
One-on-one meetings
Planning a learning session for a conference. See “Fixing a Broken Child Welfare System” in Part Three: Stories from the Field.

Attribution: Liberating Structure developed by Henri Lipmanowicz and Keith McCandless.

Storyboard from an immersion workshop in Seattle

Design StoryBoards – Advanced

Define Step-by-Step Elements for Bringing Transformation and Innovation Initiatives to Productive Endpoints (18 hrs. and up to days/weeks)

What is made possible? You can avoid many of the traps that turn transformation initiatives and innovation projects into failures: the lack of a clear and common purpose, overall and for every stage of the initiative; inadequate engagement and participation; voices that are essential but not included; frustrated participants and nonparticipants; resistance to change; groupthink; nightmarish implementation for a disproportionally small impact. A comprehensive design is a series of basic designs (see Design StoryBoards–Basic above) linked together over a period of time. The design unfolds iteratively over days, weeks, months, or sometimes years depending on the scale of the project. Small cycles of design operate within larger cycles, scaling up and out as the initiative proceeds. You can easily include more people and more diversity in the design group for larger-scale projects. You can reflect the twists and turns in a transformation or innovation effort by a careful and ad hoc selection of participants (including unusual suspects since they are often the source of novel approaches).