Do you remember learning the alphabet? And learning to spell your first words? Cat, dog, bat. Alphabets are not only easy to learn, they are endlessly adaptable and universally useful. They are the building blocks of words, ideas, and actions. With the twenty-six letters of the Roman alphabet, millions of different combinations can be strung together, enough to write all the words of many languages.

Now imagine having access to only a five-letter alphabet. How many different words and ideas could you structure with five letters? How diminished would writing, reading, and talking be? How frustrating would it be to communicate with just a few words? How boring and repetitive would your dealings with others be?

This is precisely the situation in which most people find themselves when working with other people. They are boxed in by the equivalent of a five-letter alphabet, which consists of the five methods everybody everywhere uses to organize how groups of people work together. These five conventional methods are the presentation, the managed discussion, the status report, the open discussion, and the brainstorm. This tiny alphabet is in good part the reason why so many meetings or classrooms are boring, unproductive, or frustrating. Also these conventional methods fail to create a fertile ground where innovation can emerge easily and flourish.

The purpose of this book is to greatly expand your alphabet of possible ways to interact and work with others to achieve exceptional results. It describes and explains thirty-three new “letters,” simple methods that you can learn without difficulty, with only a small amount of practice.

Figure 1

The Liberating Structures “Alphabet” of Simple Methods

These so-called Liberating Structures make it easy to transform how people interact and work together in order to achieve much better results than what is possible with presentations, reports, and other conventional methods. We call them Liberating Structures because they are designed to include and engage everybody. They “liberate,” so to speak, everybody’s contribution to the group’s success.

How well you interact and work with other people often determines not only your success at work but also in other areas of your life. You will find that each Liberating Structure has its own specific benefits. By learning to use some or all of them, you will create your own alphabet and build a different vocabulary for getting things done with others. Your new language will be endlessly adaptable and applicable as you create more combinations to fit every situation that you face in your life, whether challenge or opportunity, large or small, simple or complex.

You will also find that the power of Liberating Structures is not only surprising but also infectious. When you use Liberating Structures, people around you will enjoy the experience and see the unexpected benefits; this will likely help and encourage them to expand their own alphabets. They will become
your practicing partners and be grateful that you helped them acquire skills that will serve them forever.

When asked who are perfect candidates for using Liberating Structures, our modest response is simple: everybody
.

You will find as well that Liberating Structures scale up and down easily for use by a small or large team, a department or function, an organization, a class, a school, a community, or a social movement. That makes them useful for anything from a single meeting to a large project to a system-wide transformation initiative. You will also discover that they can help you bring more structure to one-on-one conversations and make them more productive. And, of course, they can also help you converse with yourself more effectively and transform how you think, plan, and make decisions.

When asked who are perfect candidates for using Liberating Structures, our modest response is simple: everybody. Liberating Structures are for CEOs, senior executives, middle managers, and frontline workers; professors and teachers, administrators, support staff, and students; hospital leaders, doctors, and nurses; military officers and soldiers; government employees and politicians; consultants and coaches; community leaders and philanthropists—and many more. By everybody we mean everybody!

If this were a book about tennis, golf, or skiing, you would read it knowing that its value would come only when you have practiced the methods and learned from them
.

If the notion that Liberating Structures can be universally useful sounds to you too good to be true, join the crowd; this is a common initial reaction and is understandable. You will not believe it until you discover what Liberating Structures can do for you by using them yourself and then using your imagination to extrapolate adaptations and new applications. In other words, this book contains many important ideas, but it is not a theoretical or conceptual book. Instead, it is a practical field guide written to make it easy for you to get started and make significant progress quickly so that you can find out what place to give Liberating Structures in your work and in your life.

Liberating Structures are methods for a purpose: to improve performance. If this were a book about tennis, golf, or skiing, you would read it knowing that its value would come only when you have practiced the methods and learned from them. This is the secret of how to learn and benefit from Liberating Structures: just do it, plunge in, explore, and practice as often as possible, taking advantage of the opportunities that abound daily. Be assured that no matter which Liberating Structure you try, in whatever situation, you will generate surprisingly better results than expected.

Chapter 1

Small Changes, Big Differences

For months, a father had been unable to go beyond monosyllabic responses from his teenage daughter. Then, one day, he made a small change in the way he started their conversation, and she talked to him for over an hour
.

“Not hammer strokes, but the dance of water sings the pebbles to perfection.” R. Tagore

For months, fifteen managers had been getting nowhere arguing about transforming their biweekly meeting, which they all agreed was frustrating and unproductive. Then, one day, they made a small change in the way they usually worked as a group. The payoff? Within thirty minutes, they figured out what their major problem was and decided how they would address it together
.

For years, each new batch of students in a required course attended it with little enthusiasm, doing the bare minimum to get a decent grade. Then, one semester, after small changes in the professor’s teaching methods, the students were animated and eager, feeling engaged and having fun learning concepts they found relevant to their personal lives
.

For years, the briefings for replacement officers going to Afghanistan were more numbing and overwhelming than illuminating. Then one day, thanks to small changes in the briefing process, returning officers were able to convey to their replacements the nuances of how to hit the ground running. Their replacements listened avidly, asked and got answers for
all their remaining questions, and felt more confident to start their challenging deployment
.

For decades, infections had been increasing in a hospital unit despite regular campaigns to train the staff and introduce best practices. Then one year, the unit implemented a small change in its approach to infection reduction and was able to bring down transmissions to near zero in just twelve months’ time
.

As far back as anybody could remember, strategic plan reviews had always been stressful and unpleasant; you presented your plan to the management team and they did their best to find faults in it. Then one year, a small change turned the review into an energizing, productive, and pleasant event
.

All these vignettes encapsulate true stories with a common story line: small changes in people’s routine practices produced big differences in the results they were getting.
¹All that each individual or group did was to replace what we call a “conventional microstructure” with something called a “Liberating Structure.”

What the teenager’s father did differently was to take his inspiration from a Liberating Structure called
Appreciative Interviews
. His small change was to ask his daughter, “What was the best moment of your day today?” This prompted her to tell a story, and then another, and another …

The small change made by the managers stuck on how to transform their biweekly meeting was to use two rounds of a Liberating Structure called
1-2-4-All
to address their issues and settle differences of opinion without conflict.

What the professor did differently was to introduce seemingly minor variations in her classroom approach: she replaced her lectures with a few Liberating Structures such as
Impromptu Networking, Troika Consulting
, and
Conversation Café
and created an interactive environment that provided many spaces for self-discovery and peer-to-peer learning.

The Afghanistan briefing used to consist mostly of white-paper and PowerPoint presentations. The simple change the briefing officers made in the process was to use a Liberating Structure called
Users Experience Fishbowl
in which a small group of returning officers shared their on-the-ground stories with each other while their replacements listened and later asked questions.

The hospital unit reducing its infection rate simply stopped promoting top-down campaigns and gradually engaged everybody on the unit in small and diverse group conversations. How did they do that? They used Liberating Structures such as
Discovery & Action Dialogues
and
Improv Prototyping
to have participants discover for themselves how they could contribute to reducing infections. Without buy-in imposed from the top, people volunteered to take actions on their own.

In the case of the confrontational strategic plan reviews, the small change was to eliminate the presentation routine and substitute the Liberating Structure called
Ecocycle
to engage the whole management team in assessing strategic options and cocreating the plan together.

The Invitation

Check all that apply when you think about a group or organization you work with: