A Liberating Structures… Sandbox
A Liberating Structures… Sandbox
Written by Joriam Ramos
We have a monthly online meeting where, in general, things are less than perfect:
“I was kicked out of my breakout room!”
“Where was the tab with the presentation again?”
“Sorry, we’re running a bit overtime.”
Perhaps in other spaces, this would warrant an apology. Perhaps participants would be disappointed or annoyed. But not here. The truth is that we're all there for exactly those interactions – this is not an ascetic space aimed at perfection; we're all together in the sandbox.
The concept is simple: the Q Community, a Health and Care network focused on Quality Improvement professionals, identified that a good portion of its members had an interest in learning social tools. Liberating Structures seemed like low-hanging fruit.
At first, you might imagine the classic scenario. A polite trainer joins the room, spends 45 minutes teaching a tool, perhaps sends a questionnaire, and gives everybody a nice certificate – but that’s not how the Q Community decided to run its group.
Most of our meetings start with pre-apologies: “I’m sorry, it’s my first time trying this,” and often “I came to a previous session and I was so mind-boggled that I had to try one for myself.”
Then they start – both teaching and learning and they experiment. “Sorry, where is the breakout room button again?”
The results speak for themselves, especially when newcomers use the chat to ask how they could host something like that in the future.
So what do you do with a space like this if you’ve been working with Liberating Structures for years? There’s no need for you to try out the basics – so what’s the next step?
In my case, it was time to try out my own Liberating Structures-inspired tools.
I always had a pet peeve with the voting process. I love the idea of each vote having equal value – both in big scenarios like a presidential election, but also on the smaller scale like dot-voting how to spend a budget – but there’s an inherent problem there: a learning problem.
You get to know what was chosen, but never why it was chosen. From the results, we must conjecture.
Votes are all the same; that means they’re fair but not particularly smart.
Based on that, I drew inspiration from how easy the Liberating Structures are to understand and implement and set out to create my own version of it.
What if the votes still held that same value but also carried another piece of information, one that was all about those whys?
How to engage a group of 4 people in this? And how about 20? How about a hundred?
I iterated, designed, and honed – but up until then, that was theoretical. I was imagining I had to find the absolute perfect scenario to even try my new tool.
One year later, I was introduced to the sandbox.
For a while, I didn’t realise the opportunity was staring at me. I had to watch people try new things – sometimes fail, sometimes succeed – but always being encouraged by everyone present.
One day, I joined a practice session around a Liberating Structure called Ecocycle, which was not immediately applicable to that group but was nonetheless interesting to learn about. That’s when I realised that anything could be explored then, even if the goal of the experiment was to experiment.
I’ve been using Liberating Structures in my work practice for over six years now, so when it’s my turn to host something, I tend to show up with the confidence of the experienced. That day was a little bit different.
Even with an encouraging crowd, testing something you made yourself can be intimidating, especially when the group is used to proven-and-tested tools.
But there I was! Virtual spotlights on me.
I talked about voting, talked about interactions, talked about interesting questions.
As always, things were not perfect. Somebody painted a line in front of everybody else's workspace, probably pressing the wrong button. Somebody disconnected from the call. Those things happened.
But people voted – and above all, people asked questions I would never have thought of myself. Questions that ultimately would convince me to change my structure for the better.
I’m currently working on version 2.0, but I feel I’m on more well-defined ground.
Sometimes we talk about the intelligence of the crowd, the wisdom of the many, but we’re not sure exactly what that looks like. To me, it looks exactly like that day: a group of enthusiastic learners, sometimes clicking the right buttons, sometimes the wrong ones, but always asking you the questions you needed to be asked.
Joriam facilitates the Q community liberating structures community. You can find out more about the community and join meet-ups by visiting, https://q.health.org.uk/resource/liberating-structures/
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