Strategies to Learn-And-Spread Liberating Structures
Over the last decade, we have introduced and spread Liberating Structures (LS) with a variety of “strategies.” I put quotations on strategies because our first experiments were often responses to specific constraints rather than a pre-defined game plan. We see ourselves as explorers, adjusting course as we go. Only after-the-fact of succeeding in more than one setting does our experience achieve provisional status as “strategy.”
Reading LS FAQs, the LS Menu, and the article, LS: Innovating by Including and Unleashing Everyone will help you understand what is outlined below. Very briefly, LS can help people make fast progress on their most complex challenges – problems and innovation opportunities – with simple methods that shift patterns of relationship. LS invite individual and organizational transformations.
The big four strategies include:
1. Open Access To and Immersion In the LS Portfolio: Encourage Application to What People Care About Most
2. Pick One Complex Problem and Invite Everyone To Join In Finding Solutions: Weave In Appropriate LS Methods As the Work Unfolds
3. Select An Important Event To Redesign Using LS Methods: Participants Learn LS As They Experience the Event
4. Coaching Individual Leaders and Consultants: Guiding LS Design Thinking for Specific Activities They Will Facilitate
All of the strategies help people learn and spread creative solutions. We have found # 1 to be a fast-and-deep approach to unleashing organizational transformation.