Liberating Structures Immersion Workshop

Why?

Liberating Structures to include and unleash everyone. 

The same dull meetings, projects, evaluation, and strategy suddenly become lively and full of possibility. 

What?

Liberating Structures are easy-to-learn microstructures that enhance communication and trust. They quickly foster lively participation in groups of any size, making it possible to truly include and unleash everyone. By introducing tiny shifts in the way we meet, plan, decide and relate to one another they distribute control so that participants can shape the direction themselves as the action unfolds. Engagement is a certainty whenthe innovative power once reserved for experts is in hands of everyone.

Liberating Structures are NOT best practices or complicated processes that need to be imposed on a whole organization. They do not rely on expensive and lengthy trainings in an attempt to change behaviors. 

How?

Once you’ve seen a Liberating Structure in action and practiced doing it, you can use it in any setting. Immersion Workshops are designed to introduce participants to a large number of Liberating Structures very rapidly. The idea is to create awareness of the range of possibilities that Liberating Structures open up.

Our design team works with your organization to identify current issues and problems that matter to participants and designs workshop experiences to address those real-life challenges. We will demonstrate through experience that the Liberating Structures playbook has something for everybody and can be used to tackle nearly everything.

Results

Once armed with a variety of simple microstructures, individuals and groups can choose what suits their likes and dislikes then mix-and-match them flexibly to address their challenges.

Length

In Two or three days is the ideal length allowing most Liberating Structures to be experienced. When this is not possible to organize, shorter workshops are effective alternatives. As a rough guideline, three-hour workshops can include four to six Liberating Structures and whole-day workshops twice that many. The following objectives guide their design:

• Illustrate how Liberating Structures are useful for a wide range of challenges
• Ensure that every person is likely to find one or more microstructures he or she wants to start using immediately
• Help participants gain confidence together via practice on diverse issues
• Show how Liberating Structures enable new ideas and answers to repeatedly emerge bottom up
• Illustrate how Liberating Structures methods are modular and can be mashed up easily
• Demonstrate how easy it is to generate results quickly with Liberating Structures
• Link complexity-science inspired principles to help guide everyday practice
• Duplicate the speed of frontline working conditions

Tell me and I’ll forget. Show me and I may not remember. Involve me and I’ll understand.  Native American Proverb

Liberating Structures and most of this content are licensed under a Creative Commons License. Attributions: Keith McCandless and Henri Lipmanowicz