Facilitation With Liberating Structures

The Surprising Power of Liberating Structures

People, resources and structures are conventionally the ingredients that drive the performance of organisations to generate results. What is standard in most organisations is importing best practices or imposing practices from above. What liberating structures encourage is practising deep respect for people and local solutions by including and unleashing everyone when approaching challenges and problems.

What are Microstructures and why do they matter?

Macrostructures are designed for the long-term, they are static and hard to influence e.g. buildings, policies, and organisations. Microstructures are designed for the short term and easily changed e.g. meeting rooms, offices, presentations, agendas, and questions. For most organisations these end up becoming fixed e.g. where everyone sits in the office, the same PowerPoint presentations format for steering groups, and project updates.

This juxtaposition can be seen in the target organisation structures between a stereotypical traditional waterfall organisation being perceived as Bureaucratic, and mechanistic, and an Agile organisation with evolutionary delivery models being organic, participative and flexible encouraging social action. Source: Compassion Between Traditional and Agile Methodologies (Nerur et al. 2005).

Tangible microstructures are the physical space where interaction takes place.

Intangible microstructures are presentations, processes, discussions, and questions that facilitators can easily influence to drive change.

Conventional Microstructures:

Conventional microstructures: can be split down into 5 areas: presentation, managed discussion, status report, and open discussions that pivot between centralised control with small numbers of people sharing content and shaping the next steps, to distributed control that equally achieves low levels of individuals shaping next steps due to impact of excessive power dynamics, competition, that ultimately results in disengagement and bodies being present but minds absent. (we've all been there, especially when working from home)

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