Everybody wants “liberating structures” to drive their groups and causes. These health pros think they’ve found them all
An old friend coming out of the high era of integral thinking, Matthew Mezey, met us the other day. Matthew brought us a whole community of practice, based in health institutions and the NHS, that aims at a very sophisticated and productive level of group and team performance, providing some rules and complex methods for collaboration.
We all want this, whether an activist or health consultant! Its general title is “Liberating Structures”, defined below:
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.
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.
…If you are new to LS, we recommend that you start practicing with the simplest (e.g., 1-2-4-All, Impromptu Networking), starting from the top left (of the graphic above) and moving to the most intricate at the bottom right (Panarchy, Purpose-To-Practice). The more intricate methods use many of the simpler LS as building blocks. Read Microstructures & Design Elements to learn more about how they work.
More here. And there’s a page of case studies too.
As A/UK, we’d certainly want to use some of these when trying to build or emerge a constitute in any community - see here.