Free Your Team With Liberating Structures
From the Voices on Project Management Blog
by Cameron McGaughy,
Lynda Bourne, Kevin Korterud, Peter Tarhanidis, Conrado Morlan, Jen Skrabak, Mario Trentim, Christian Bisson, Yasmina Khelifi, Sree Rao, Soma Bhattacharya, Emily Luijbregts, David Wakeman, Ramiro Rodrigues, Wanda Curlee, Lenka Pincot, cyndee miller, Jorge Martin Valdes Garciatorres, Marat Oyvetsky
Voices on Project Management offers insights, tips, advice and personal stories from project managers in different regions and industries. The goal is to get you thinking, and spark a discussion. So, if you read something that you agree with--or even disagree with--leave a comment.
View Posts By:
Cameron McGaughy
Lynda Bourne
Kevin Korterud
Peter Tarhanidis
Conrado Morlan
Jen Skrabak
Mario Trentim
Christian Bisson
Yasmina Khelifi
Sree Rao
Soma Bhattacharya
Emily Luijbregts
David Wakeman
Ramiro Rodrigues
Wanda Curlee
Lenka Pincot
cyndee miller
Jorge Martin Valdes Garciatorres
Marat Oyvetsky
Past Contributors:
Rex Holmlin
Vivek Prakash
Dan Goldfischer
Linda Agyapong
Jim De Piante
Siti Hajar Abdul Hamid
Bernadine Douglas
Michael Hatfield
Deanna Landers
Kelley Hunsberger
Taralyn Frasqueri-Molina
Alfonso Bucero Torres
Marian Haus
Shobhna Raghupathy
Peter Taylor
Joanna Newman
Saira Karim
Jess Tayel
Lung-Hung Chou
Rebecca Braglio
Roberto Toledo
Geoff Mattie
Recent Posts
Project 2030: Skills We Need to Cultivate Now
The Technical Program Manager: How to Stay Relevant in 2025
5 Things Your Operational Plan Should Do
5 New Project Guardrails for Adaptive Leaders
The Leader's Voice: Respect It, Protect It, and Use It Properly!
Categories
2020,
Adult Development,
Agile,
Agile,
Agile,
agile,
Agile management,
Agile management,
Agile;Community;Talent management,
Artificial Intelligence,
Backlog,
Basics,
Benefits Realization,
Best Practices,
BIM,
business acumen,
Business Analysis,
Business Analysis,
Business Case,
Business Intelligence,
Business Transformation,
Calculating Project Value,
Canvas,
Career Development,
Career Development,
Career Help,
Career Help,
Career Help,
Career Help,
Careers,
Careers,
Careers,
Careers,
Categories: Career Help,
Change Management,
Cloud Computing,
Collaboration,
Collaboration,
Collaboration,
Collaboration,
Collaboration,
Communication,
Communication,
Communication,
Communication,
Communications Management,
Complexity,
Conflict,
Conflict Management,
Consulting,
Continuous Learning,
Continuous Learning,
Continuous Learning,
Continuous Learning,
Continuous Learning,
Cost Management,
COVID-19,
Crises,
Crisis Management,
critical success factors,
Cultural Awareness,
Culture,
Decision Making,
Design Thinking,
Digital Project Management,
Digital Transformation,
digital transformation,
Digitalisation,
Disruption,
Diversity,
Diversity,
Documentation,
Earned Value Management,
Education,
EEWH,
Enterprise Risk Management,
Escalation management,
Estimating,
Ethics,
execution,
Expectations Management,
Facilitation,
feasibility studies,
Future,
Future of Project Management,
Generational PM,
Governance,
Government,
green building,
Growth,
Horizontal Development,
Human Aspects of PM,
Human Aspects of PM,
Human Aspects of PM,
Human Aspects of PM,
Human Aspects of PM,
Human Resources,
Inclusion,
Information Technology,
Innovation,
Intelligent Building,
International,
International Development,
Internet of Things (IOT),
Internet of Things (IoT),
IOT,
Knowledge,
Leadership,
Leadership,
Leadership,
Leadership,
Leadership,
lean construction,
LEED,
Lessons Learned,
Lessons learned;Retrospective,
Managing for Stakeholders,
managing stakeholders as clients,
Mentoring,
Mentoring,
Mentoring,
Mentoring,
Mentoring,
Methodology,
Metrics,
Micromanagement,
Microsoft Project PPM,
Motivation,
Negotiation,
Neuroscience,
neuroscience,
New Practitioners,
Nontraditional Project Management,
OKR,
Online Learning,
opportunity,
Organizational Culture,
Organizational Project Management,
Pandemic,
People management,
Planing,
planning,
PM & the Economy,
PM History,
PM Think About It,
PMBOK Guide,
PMI,
PMI EMEA 2018,
PMI EMEA Congress 2017,
PMI EMEA Congress 2019,
PMI Global Conference 2017,
PMI Global Conference 2018,
PMI Global Conference 2019,
PMI Global Congress 2010 - North America,
PMI Global Congress 2011 - EMEA,
PMI Global Congress 2011 - North America,
PMI Global Congress 2012 - EMEA,
PMI Global Congress 2012 - North America,
PMI Global Congress 2013 - EMEA,
PMI Global Congress 2013 - North America,
PMI Global Congress 2014 - EMEA,
PMI Global Congress 2014 - North America,
PMI GLobal Congress EMEA 2018,
PMI PMO Symposium 2012,
PMI PMO Symposium 2013,
PMI PMO Symposium 2015,
PMI PMO Symposium 2016,
PMI PMO Symposium 2017,
PMI PMO Symposium 2018,
PMI Pulse of the Profession,
PMO,
PMO,
pmo,
PMO Project Management Office,
portfolio,
Portfolio Management,
Portfolio Management,
portfolio management,
presentations,
Priorities,
Probability,
Problem Structuring Methods,
Process,
Procurement Management,
profess,
Program Management,
project,
Project Delivery,
Project Dependencies,
Project Failure,
project failure,
Project Leadership,
Project Management,
project management,
project management office,
Project Planning,
project planning,
Project Requirements,
Project Success,
Ransomware,
Reflections on the PM Life,
Remote,
Remote Work,
Requirements Management,
Research Conference 2010,
Researching the Value of Project Management,
Resiliency,
Risk Management,
Risk Management,
Risk management,
risk management,
ROI,
Roundtable,
Salary Survey,
Schedule Management,
Scheduling,
Scope Management,
Scrum,
search,
SelfLeadership,
SelfLeadership,
SelfLeadership,
SelfLeadership,
SelfLeadership,
Servant Leadership,
Sharing Knowledge,
Sharing Knowledge,
Sharing Knowledge,
Sharing Knowledge,
Sharing Knowledge,
Social Responsibility,
Sponsorship,
Stakeholder Management,
Stakeholder Management,
stakeholder management,
Strategy,
Strategy,
swot,
Talent Management,
Talent Management,
Talent Management,
Talent Management,
Talent Management,
Talent Management Leadership SelfLeadership Collaboration Communication,
Taskforce,
Teams,
Teams in Agile,
Teams in Agile,
teamwork,
Tech,
Technical Debt,
Technology,
TED Talks,
The Project Economy,
Timeline,
Tools,
tools,
Transformation,
transformation,
Transition,
Trust,
Value,
Vertical Development,
Volunteering,
Volunteering #Leadership #SelfLeadership,
Volunteering Sharing Knowledge Leadership SelfLeadership Collaboration Trust,
VUCA,
Women in PM,
Women in Project Management
Date
.jpg)
By Christian Bisson, PMP
I recently had the privilege to participate in the 9th Montreal agile coach gathering. Along with meeting great people and having a chance to exchange ideas with them, I had the opportunity to learn about “liberating structures”, a concept developed by Henri Lipmanowicz and Keith McCandless.
Liberating structures are 33 alternative structures for facilitating meetings, work sessions or retrospectives. Unlike conventional structures, such as status reports or presentations, liberating structures are meant to distribute control of the conversation so that all participants are part of shaping direction. This ultimately helps everyone work together while feeling more in control. According to Lipmanowicz and McCandless, conventional structures are either too inhibiting or too loose and disorganzed to achieve this.
Within your organization, liberating structures can be used to organize and facilitate work sessions, retrospectives or other types of meetings. These structures range from simple and fast exercises to those suited for more structured and longer meetings, giving a diversified toolset for various circumstances.
One evening during the 9th Montreal agile coach gathering, everyone gathered into small teams, picked one of the liberating structures randomly, and took 25 minutes to understand and discuss it with the objective of presenting it to everyone else afterward within a three-minute timebox.
Our team picked “critical uncertainties”, which makes you focus on essential and uncertain realities, and then plan strategies according to different possible futures. Among brainstormed ideas, you need to identify the most robust strategies (i.e., the ones that would work with the most possible futures). You can then plan action items based on what was discussed.
Another one that caught my interest is “1-2-4-all.” It is simple and can be used in so many circumstances, yet it is efficient to help a group of people (small or large) communicate and share great ideas.
For anyone out there who is a fan of liberating structures, I’m curious to find out which ones you used, in what context, and how was the result. Please share and discuss!
Posted
by
Christian Bisson
on: March 15, 2019 06:39 AM |
Permalink
Comments (16)
Please login or join to subscribe to this item
LORI WILSON
RETIRED - Technical Project Manager| RETIRED - LifePoint Health
Clarkston, Wa, United States
Thank you for sharing, I am interested in learning more about liberating structures and will look into this!
Vinod Kumar Paidakula
Director, Technical Program Management| DraftKings USA
Tallahassee, Fl, United States
Vincent Guerard
Coach - Trainer - Speaker - Advisor| Freelance
Mont-Royal, Quebec, Canada
Will look into, sound interesting, also available some other languages.
Merci
Thilo Wack
Head of Existing Product and Test Lab| optimed
Tholey-Hasborn, Germany
Christian, thanks for bringing this up. LS are really quite powerful. We used the user experience fishbowl as a way to improve the understanding between two factions in the team.
Hi Thilo,
thanks for the feedback.
I'm curious to know more about how it went, for example, did everyone participate easily? Did everyone see the benefit of the session, and did they have fun?
Thanks for sharing!
Interesting, Thanks Sharing.
RAJESH K L
Project Manager, PMP| Bharat Electronics, Bengaluru, India
Bengaluru, Karnataka, India
Interesting. Thanks for sharing!!
Thilo Wack
Head of Existing Product and Test Lab| optimed
Tholey-Hasborn, Germany
Christian,
actually it went quite well. The project managers were first. They talked about accountability and how projects slip when prio1 tasks get delayed and pushed into the next sprint while other tasks actually get done. The developers came next and they talked about they were always pushed to add more to the sprint backlog than they felt comfortable with and that they often did not have enough information about some of the tasks so that the clear ones would get done and the unclear ones remained. It was a great start to a discussion that really helped us improve and that never developed in our retrospectives where topics just came up from each personal point of view...
Amazing, thanks for sharing!
Amazing, thanks for sharing!
Best , thanks for sharing!
Interesting and valuable techniques to engage members in generating questions and suggestions. Thank you Christian for sharing
I really appreciate your efforts and sharing the article.
I found that mostly (senior management) emphasised more on ‘open’ as opposed to ‘specific method(s)’ in project management which i guess can be liberating but also causing difficulties of differing scale, coming from many directions at times. Would be interesting to learn future best pratices and really looking forward to the next articles, thanks for sharing!
Eduard Hernandez
Community Champion
Product Operations Program Manager
Barcelona, Cataluña, Spain
I find the term liberating confusing. In any brainstorming, root cause analysis etc. session, the Project Manager facilitates the session and the whole team is entitled to voice out their thoughts and ideas. What is then the specificity that LS add? Thanks for the blog entry.
Please Login/Register to leave a comment.
|
"I never resist temptation, because I have found that things that are bad for me do not tempt me."
- George Bernard Shaw
|
