Principles of Liberating Structures
From Implicit Beliefs To Explicit Action
Our work with LS started with the purpose of unleashing the hidden potential of frontline groups to innovate. The “how” was to equip them with simple work methods, namely Liberating Structures, to help them discover their collective intelligence and creativity. To this end we introduced LS through workshops attended simultaneously by CEO’s, their management teams and frontline people.
These workshop experiences inspired leaders in many countries to start using LS themselves. After a while we have seen a number of them shift how they lead and organize away from traditional “command and control.” As their experience with LS grew they discovered new possibilities and their views about leadership evolved.
By using LS these leaders discovered that it is possible and not that difficult to include and unleash everyone in jointly addressing opportunities and challenges. In the process they saw that every individual has not only influence but also something to contribute, and that much more can be achieved by inviting those contributions. They saw how people are motivated by their participation, how inclusion builds ownership and the capacity to implement with adaptability and resilience.
In many instances they saw resistance to change evaporate as people co-created together with their management and trust grew 
between them. They noticed how local, internally developed solutions generate support and can outperform imported best practices.
They experienced first hand that the whole group is much smarter than any single individual or task force. They were surprised that key contributions often came from unexpected sources whenever the right conditions had been created.
We have seen the same things via their stories and through our own eyes, and we too have acted our way into new thinking. We have come to value the essential importance of clarifying purpose before any work gets started. We have become convinced that purpose is not clear until it is both common and meaningful to all the participants. We have become obsessive about self-discovery and do our best to stimulate it rather than providing our own solutions or answers. We are absolutely sure that playfulness enhances performance and are very serious about it.
The following Principles sum up this way of “seeing." Through thrills and spills of transforming change we try to live by them. We offer them to all who are attracted to including and unleashing everyone. Enjoy the journey!
Principle When LS are part of everyday interactions, it is possible to: |
Must Do’s Often valued & espoused but not often practiced. LS make it possible to START or AMPLIFY these practices.
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Must NOT Do’s Often unnoticed, or “autopilot” behaviors. LS make it possible to STOP or REDUCE these practices.
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1. Include and Unleash Everyone
| Invite everyone touched by a challenge to share possible solutions or invent new approaches together. Actively reach across levels, beyond the usual suspects. | Appoint a few to design an “elegant solution” and then tell all others to implement it after the fact. Confront resistance with hours of PPT presentations. Force buy-in. Separate deciders from doers.
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2. Practice Deep Respect for People and Local Solutions | Engage people doing the work & familiar with the local context. Trust and unleash their collective expertise and inventiveness to solve complex challenges. Let go of the compulsion to control.
| Import best practices, drive buy-in, or assume people need more training. Privilege experts and computer systems over local people and know-how. |
3. Build Trust As You Go
| Cultivate a trusting group climate where speaking the truth is valued and shared ownership is the goal. Sift ideas & make decisions using input from everyone. Practice “nothing about me without me.” Be a leader and a follower.
| Over-help or over-control the work of others. Respond to ideas from others with cynicism, ridicule, criticism, or punishment. Praise and pretend to follow the ideas of others.
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4. Learn by Failing Forward
| Debrief every step. Make it safe to speak up. Discover positive variation. Include and unleash clients as you innovate. Take risks safely.
| Focus on doing and deciding. Avoid difficult conversations and gloss over failures. Punish risk-takers when unknowable surprises pop-up. |
5. Practice Self-Discovery Within A Group
| Engage groups to the maximum degree in discovering solutions on their own. Increase diversity to spur creativity, broaden potential solutions and enrich peer-to-peer learning. Encourage experiments on multiple tracks.
| Impose solutions from the top. Let experts “educate” and tell people what to do. Assume that people resist change no matter what. Substitute laminated signs for conversation. Exclude front line people from innovating.
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Principle When LS are part of everyday interactions, it is possible to: |
Must Do’s Often valued & espoused but not often practiced. LS make it possible to START or AMPLIFY these practices.
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Must NOT Do’s Often unnoticed, or “autopilot” behaviors. LS make it possible to STOP or REDUCE these practices.
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6. Amplify Freedom AND Responsibility | Specify minimum constraints and let go of over-control. Use the power of invitation. Privilege fast experiments over playing it safe. Track progress rigorously and feed back results to all. Invite frontline workers to create their own metrics. Expose and celebrate mistakes as sources of progress. | Unleash people without structure such as a clear purpose or minimum specifications. Let rules and procedures stifle initiative. Ignore the value of people understanding how their work affects one another. Keep frontline staff in the dark about performance data.
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7. Emphasize Possibilities: Believe Before You See
| Expose what is working well. Focus on what can be accomplished now with the imagination and materials at hand. Take the next steps that lead to the edge of creativity and renewal. | Focus on what’s wrong. Wait for all the barriers to come down or ideal conditions to emerge. Work on changing the whole system all at once. |
8. Invite Creative Destruction To Enable Innovation
| Convene conversations about what is keeping people from working on the essence of their work. Remove the barriers even when it feels like heresy. Make it easy for people to deal with their fears.
| Avoid or delay stopping the behaviors, practices and policies that are revealed as barriers. Assume obstacles don’t matter or can’t be removed.
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9. Engage In Seriously-Playful Curiosity
| Stir things up – with levity, paradoxical questions, and improv – to spark a deep exploration of current practices and latent innovations. Make working together both demanding and inviting. | Keep it simple by deciding in advance what the solutions should be. Control all conversations. Ask only closed yes or no questions. Make working together feel like drudgery. |