Liberating Structures

Conducted first liberating structure at work today - it was great! We have a very siloed, dysfunctional team and the condition has been impacting our ability to deliver on a variety of levels.

Got to do the first step of P to P today. It was fantastic. There are two great takeaways:

1. We were surprised at how we all had basically the same common goals, even though many members are at odds with one another.

2. We did it on the floor and people from other areas were stopping us in the hall and asking us about the liberating structures exercise.

Thanks for all your hard work and help guys... you are making a difference!

Congrats on a very important first step! Your discovery that all of you have the same common goals is very valuable. Moving along with the next steps will reveal where divergences and differences show up. Having started as you did should give you the opportunity to make sense of differences and figure out how to handle them.
Were you able to end with a sentence "Our purpose is ...." or are you still working on that?
Sometimes spending a bit of time on Principles and Participants and then coming back to Purpose can help since the understanding generated by discussing Principles and Participants is likely to be useful to clarify Purpose.
Working on the floor (I take it to mean that you were sitting on the floor} has the great advantage of keeping everybody on the same physical level. In other words nobody is standing up and taking control while everybody else is sitting, using the markers and the flip chart to channel the discussion. That is why we often prefer to see people writing with flip chart paper on the floor instead of up on a board.

Fantastic is the kind of word that makes us smile :-) Thank you!

We are going to work on the "Our purpose is..." next time. This was the first step for this team and a very big one. I used the 1-2-4-All which resulted in three Purpose statements. Next we will work on distilling these. Thanks for the tip though, I think we may need to do some other LS to get everyone on the same page. We will just fail forward. Lots of positive feedback so far.

On the floor meant the general working area, where other teams could hear us. But thanks for the great tip! We have other teams wanting to know more. After a few of these I want to start getting others to practice them with the team.

Very unexpected success!