Global Flipchart

By Anja Ebers

Berlin is Europe’s largest and most active community on Meetup, the global platform for local groups. One of the more recent new entrants is the Liberating Structures Lab.

Liberating Structures are a collection of 33 practical facilitative methods designed to stimulate critical conversations and to liberate the full potential of any group. With their book The Surprising Power of Liberating Structures and the respective website www.liberatingstructures.com Henri Lipmanowicz and Keith McCandles have inspired people around the world to adopt collaboration habits that engage the whole organization and to exchange stories from the field.

The Liberating Structures Lab Berlin invites members to explore a theme using the structures and experience an evening with others looking to make meetings and gatherings more inclusive and engaging while using a few of the Liberating Structures.

The Liberating Structures Lab has rotating facilitators who thus learn and practice new methods: a unique opportunity for me to “play” in a safe environment and get inspiration and valuable feedback.

Sylvia Taylor, Timon Fiddike and Anton Skornyakov are part of Berlin’s growing Agile community and the lab’s founders. Sylvia is supporting companies shifting to a more agile mindset. Timon and Anton help companies in building successful software products with happy teams as freelance agile coaches and facilitators.

They are convinced that it is possible to create a completely new culture of cooperation and collaboration working with Liberating Structures.

I was curious to learn from them what they see emerging in the light of our theme Facilitative Leadership:

What made you start the LS Group in Berlin?

Sylvia: It was my intention (..) to build a community around Liberating Structures. I had been encouraged by several friends in the Agile community to engage with the Culture Hacking meet-up group and that's where Timon, Anton and I met. They saw the connection to creating a more agile mindset right away, and were game to be my partners in crime, so to speak, in building a community around these great practices.

Anton: Timon and I were thinking about starting a meetup that would be useful for agile coaches and Scrum masters in Berlin, where people would not only talk about Scrum related challenges, but would actually have a chance of practicing their work. This demand was obvious to me, since I’ve been down this road myself and have seen few scrum masters actually doing “coaching” instead of “managing”. And I believe the change cannot just come from a several-day training.

How would you describe the members of your group - what kind of crowd is it?

Timon: When we started the meetup, we invited friends from the agile community and many of them have returned several times. Coaches, project managers and others have discovered the meetup as well. I’m curious to see how this will develop.

Sylvia: The group is still in formation, which is great, since we're still so new. We see a lot of people coming from IT; Agile Coaches, Scrum Masters and the like, but we are also getting coaches, trainers and culture hackers from other industries who are curious about how to engage and involve more people where they work.

What is your key take-away after a couple of meetups?

Timon: The first meetups were planned and run by the founders. Then members expressed their interest in helping out and facilitating and we started including them. Yesterday we met for a retrospective and design session and the office where we met was almost crowded, because there were eight of us. I’m glad that so many members contribute.

Sylvia: That folks still think in terms of 'this is a tool', which it is, however, it's so much more than that. This is a set of micro-structures that can help shift culture (behaviors and mindsets), and though they seem rather simple, they still take practice. It's not just about a single structure, it's about how you invite people into the conversation; about how you use the structures in combination to one another.  That's where the magic is, and that's what takes some practice. The meetups are a safe place to learn AND practice it.

What is the major take-away of the meetups for the members who are in a leading role in their organizations?

Sylvia: We haven't seen too many executives or leads coming, which is unfortunate because I think what they would see is that everyone in their organization has the ability to be engaged and that the best solutions can come from anywhere in the org, if people are engaged in the right way. Liberating Structures has the framework in engage at all levels of an organization and bring people into conversation with each other in a safe and really fun way.

Timon: One member who has a leading role in his organisation very much liked the idea of engaging people more. He has used LS many times now and has also facilitated at our meetup.

What do those, who experienced how efficient and effective a group interaction facilitated by LS,  bring back to their organizations?  

Anton: From some participants, we know that they have been applying the structures with high intensity in their organisations.

Sylvia: I hope they bring back an infectious enthusiasm that sharing and learning from each other doesn't have to be rigid (Agendas) or chaotic (brainstorming), but that it can be flexible and creative, and real conversations about what matters can happen!

How would you describe the future of facilitation as a professional offering in the light of a growing use of methodologies such as LS in organizations?

Sylvia: I think of facilitation as part coaching, part training, part expert in the back of the room. The micro-structures of LS really put the power and the responsibility in the hands of anyone who wants to help create a more learning organization. And they are fun. They create a dynamic and an environment where rich conversations among all levels of an organization can take place. They enable more, better communication, which still seems to be the biggest challenge we all face.

Anton: I see the importance of facilitation on the rise. The main reason from my point of view is the success of Agile, in particular Scrum in IT combined with the fact that “Software is eating the world”.  Scrum is the only framework that has a facilitator and coach role built in.

Facilitation is important wherever groups of people work together. So in future I believe, we will see more people professionally focused on the meta level of work within all kinds of organizations. In my view Liberating Structures and other methods such as the Core Protocols or Non-Violent Communication or many other schools of thought are helping build this new world in two different ways. On one hand, they provide techniques or tools. On the other hand, they introduce leaders to a different role - the one of a coach and facilitator.

Thank you Sylvia, Timon and Anton for setting up the Lab and for sharing your insights!

Related links:

• www.liberatingstructures.com
• Liberating Structures Group on LinkedIn
• We'll conduct a Liberating Structures Lab during Facilitation Week (Thursday, 20 October, Berlin)
• There are various Liberating Structures user groups on Meetup. See if your region is already on the map and start practicing!