Who: Offered by BC Campus and facilitated by Nancy White

When: February 22 and 23 2017

What:

Liberating structures (http://www.liberatingstructures.com/) are a series of practical facilitation strategies that can be used to break down the the traditional power structures in meetings, workshops and other interactions. These structures include everyone and help create an atmosphere that engages more people and brings a greater variety of perspectives into conversations.

Although the Liberating Structures website contains all the information you need to apply these structures to your classroom, workshop or meeting, this workshop provided an opportunity to use about half the structures as a participant.

As a participant, I really appreciated getting a chance to engage with a variety of different people in different roles through the use of Liberating Structures. This gave me a “feel” for what structures are a bit more difficult to use, and which felt more natural from a participants’ perspective. I also appreciated that all the facilitators made their thinking about how they introduced and applied the structures clear, which helped to frame how these structures could be applied in a practice sense.

The structures we experienced at the workshop were:

• Impromptu Networking
• 1-2-4-All
  • A “rif” on Think-Pair-Share, this is probably one of the most natural and familiar of the Liberating Structures from an education background, but this structure pushes us further into exploring and building ideas in smaller groups.
• 9 Whys
• What, So What, Now What? W3
  • I really enjoyed this structure as a way of framing what happened without judgement or reflection (What), which makes forming critical inquiries into the effect of what happened much more valuable (So What), and moving forward from a place of shared understanding (Now What) much easier.
• Wicked Questions
• Appreciative Interviews
• Ecocycle
• User Experience Fishbowl
• The 15% Solution
  • A different way to think of problem-solving, the 15% solution makes larger, hard to tackle problems seem less daunting as it invites you to get started in working through challenges.
• Troika Consulting
  • This is another structure I enjoyed because it removes judgement when gathering feedback or information about a challenge. The removal of the need to defend or validate your challenge was very powerful.
• Mad Tea – a structure still in development
• Purpose to Practice
• TRIZ
  • This structure is a lot of fun, as you get to start with building a “worst-case scenario” and then challenge yourself to thinking about what aspects of that you are doing (and can stop or change). This structure is about stopping negativity and making things better within current ideas, not inventing something completely new.
• 25-10 Crowd sourcing
• Min Specs
• Improv Prototyping
• Shift and Share