Keith McCandless and Henri Lipmanowicz on acting your way into a new kind of organising with Liberating Structures

Lisa: So Keith and Henry, thank you for being on the Leadermorphosis podcast. First of all, maybe if we start somewhere simple, could you tell the listeners what are liberating structures? Keith is nodding so he’s going to explain this to us.

Keith: That’s seemingly a simple question, Lisa. I think the best way to say it, if your listeners want to transform an organization, liberating structures are micro structures that shape how people relate to each other. The structure part is who speaks and who they speak to and how long they have and little trivial things that structure the pattern of relating, the pattern of conversation. Because of that little micro structure, little itty-bitty simple shifts in conventional patterns, a distributed form of organizing is possible. And with that more distributed form, intelligence, vitality, and a bunch of other wonderful things are possible. That’s the liberation part.

So one way to understand this is to look at one example, very one of the very simple structures we call it “1-2-4-All,” and what it consists of is asking a group of people of any size to spend a moment alone thinking about something, maybe writing down a question or a comment or whatever, and then spending a couple of minutes in pairs going further into the question, other comments or whatever, then in groups of four - two pairs together - and then sharing the most important thing that have come across from each group with the rest of the assembly. So that’s a very very simple way to get everybody to participate in whatever is happening. That’s “1-2-4-All.”

Henri: And so that’s it, that’s it. It’s a very simple thing that anybody can learn very quickly. You have just learned how to do “1-2-4-All” and now you can do it.

Lisa: I think that’s something that really appeals to me about liberating structures is that you don’t have to be a facilitator or to do any kind of certification. You learn by doing, by experiencing them, and once you’ve experienced a liberating structure you can try it out in your own organization. It can spread virally. Or even as you say, like I’ve first started experimenting with them but just by reading the book or looking on the website and just having a go. And “1-2-4-All” is such a simple but powerful micro structure that people can use in meetings or any kinds of discussions to kind of get a sense of what’s going on in the group, but in a way that everyone can participate and you can kind of crystallize I guess and distill some of that in a meaningful way without it being this kind of messy open discussion.

So at present there are thirty-three liberating structures, and I know there are sort of some others in development, and now there’s a big community around the liberating structures. But what prompted you to curate these micro structures in the first place? Like what was the calling for you to bring them into the world?

Keith: Well, it totally came out of our practice. So if there’s a motto or a tagline for liberating structures, it’s “you know, act your way into a new kind of organizing.” You probably aren’t gonna think your way into it, or it’s gonna take forever if you think your way into it. So the fastest way to move forward is to act your way.

So in our consulting practice, we found each other in a Science Institute that Henry founded after he retired and we’re both pretty practical. We’re listening to mathematicians and physicists and biologists and ecologists, got inspired by the complexity science thinking, and then we went out and started doing things. And people were doing things with that, you know, you got to - you got to write this down, you got a - you know, there were encouragement along the way.

And even though we were practicing, the results of what we were doing, Lisa, were mysterious. It’s like, what just happened? How could that be? We had an experience in Ohio with a big Health System and a group that CEO. We were doing sort of an early version of wise crowds and user experience fishbowl, and we had them doing the work. And Henry and I are both going “wow, this is still a bad meeting, this is not… where it’s like, is anything happening?” And then the boss, the CEO of the whole thing stood up, very excited, kind of waved his arms, just set out loud “everything we just did, that’s a final decision, that’s the best conversation we’ve ever had.” And Henry and I were both like “what happened, what happened that was different?”

And I don’t know about you Henry, but for me it was like I really wanted to figure out like why was that powerful for the client? What - why did that use a group of users, and this was pretty high-profile - why what happened for them? So Henry may have another answer.

Henri: A couple of things. I mean, one of them, as you recall, both of us were associated with that - I was one of the founders of an institute, and Keith was very much at the center of that, too - Complexis Institute, those devoted to spreading ideas about complex systems. And the notion that you could use those ideas and those concepts as a way of organizing, you know, as a way of running organizations. So the idea was that organizations are complex systems, they are not machines, and therefore we shouldn’t run them like machines. You know, they are not controllable, hierarchy systems don’t really work well.

So we had a lot of people that were interested, loved the idea, but like, you know, we started off not knowing what we were doing. We didn’t know how they could start, with only not at the level that we can talk about, not certainly at a theoretical level.

Keith: Yeah, I’d say that we practiced together out in the field for 10 or 12 years before we got serious. And it’s sort of like, you know, you put an outfit on in the morning and there’s that old saying: what you always take one thing off? Where we had a group of things that we did, practices, and once we got serious, we needed to dramatically simplify - like take stuff away. There wasn’t any adding. What we were doing was fine, but it was way too complicated. We wanted the minimum specifications for each activity that would generate the most generative output, both in the vitality of the group and what they’re trying to do.

And that was a little different than what we were doing out in the wild. That was about writing and then testing again, and then - could somebody else do what we all had, you know, up in our fuzzy heads? Those are two kind of separate things we did once we started writing and having people try things.

And it’s time for another buck, Henry. It really is. The practitioners have outpaced us by a good measure. The global community of practitioners are continuing to simplify. And like Lisa, you suggested there’s at least six, maybe eight really good new liberating structures that address needs. They aren’t just about anything, they address needs that were not addressed in the first 33.

Henri: So I think there are a couple of things that are important, and that is, I think, speaking for me - and I would assume for Keith as well - I don’t think we would have engaged in what we did without the reaction of the people that were exposed to the structures. I think this was a revelation, you know. It is really the impact that we had when we did some of these early workshops with groups of people, and how quickly the dynamics in the group changed - it was really dramatic. And how they themselves, I mean, it was sort of like an explosion of “we have never experienced anything like this.”

And this was - I remember some of those early workshops where we had several layers of management, you know, six, seven layers hierarchy, and people who normally never, almost hardly talked to each other. And how the people at the lower level, within the matter of a couple of hours, started behaving completely differently and really taking their space in the room. And so forth, visibly, people of - there were two, three, four echelons above them. And so those kind of things were striking. Who was - what’s going on here? What do we have here? What is happening?

So I think that was for me, that was very important because it wasn’t about us thinking “we got something special here,” it was about the participants telling us, “we have something special.” So that was one thing, there was a big factor.

And then the process, however long and painful sometimes it was, the process of writing was a tremendous exercise because it forced us to really think through each one of those structures in ways that made it possible to make it simple, straightforward, understandable for anybody. You know, what is it? What can you do with it? What is it gonna do for you? And made us also appreciate the fact that because we had this range, and that each of those structures was serving a particular purpose, when you start putting them together individually and then start connecting them together, that you could address just about any situation.

Keith: So I want to roll back one story for Lisa, since one of your interests is the self-organization, self-organizing. This one, a meeting that Henry was mentioning, was in Brazil, was a very first workshop we did. And there were all these levels, and then at the end, probably 20 or 25 frontline people in the Brazil organization and a couple of their bosses were having a dialogue about what are they gonna do when they get that. Or whatever it is.

And this was very revealing, this story just - the interaction there was so good. So the leaders were doing their normal thing. You know, “what is it that you need from us? What is it that you need from us to…” And you can see that all the frontline people got very nervous. They were like looking at each other should we tell them or not. And finally somebody got up the courage and said, “Well, really we don’t need anything from you. Nothing. I think we just got what we need in this workshop.”

And then the leaders sort of went, “Oh my god, what’s my job now?” I no longer need to be the bot- I no longer need to be the provider, the boss, the father, the patriarch, the whatever it may be. That was over, at least in that moment, an evaporation, does that kind of relationship went poof. I was like… but it was a hint, it was only a hint. Henry, how much am I exaggerating there?

Henri: Yeah, there was that sort of grain, I don’t know, “we don’t need anything,” like, dramatic gesture. So it was kind of like “yeah, don’t need you.” But there was something else that happened, which I think was very dramatic, and that was right at the beginning of that meeting. Remember I’m pretty sure at that first meeting, it was actually with my former company, with Merck, and it coincided with, on the Friday before that meeting, the company withdrew Vioxx, another most important product that they had.

And so I mean, this was a very dramatic thing that happened, and this was like cutting 20% of the business overnight. And we return there from that weekend. And the meeting was starting on Monday, and obviously, nobody could think about anything else. What’s gonna happen? I mean, there were people that were working for that product, so they’re all - their whole jobs were gone, basically. Although have they had no idea what’s going to happen, this was announced on Friday. And everything else, you know - stock options, salaries, positions, jobs, etc. That’s gonna happen to the company. I mean, it was a very very dramatic thing.

And so here we are on Monday morning, we have just, you know, we’re gonna have this workshop. And we knew that nobody had their mind - they had zero interest in a workshop at this point in time. The only thing they wanted was - and so we had this conversation, Keith and I, and so “what do we do?” And then we decide, you know, in the moment that “Okay, we can’t do the workshop. We’ve got to do something else,” but just do something which is related to what they want. Forget our agenda.

And so we start with the Conversation Café, where we, with a question, the invitation was “is there life after Vioxx?” Less than ever that thought. And we just gave them time, we did one round, two round, and let them talk about - and it was amazing. After an hour and a half or so, they had unloaded everything that they needed to talk about by themselves, with each other, shared some of it across some of the groups and so forth. And when this was over, we just said, “Okay, so are you ready to go now? Do you want to go ahead with the workshop?” And they said, “We’re ready,” and the subject didn’t come up for two days again.

And so that was for me certainly, you know, that was - it also was one of those amazing experiences of how you can do something that is profoundly simple as a structure and deal with a problem that is profoundly difficult and complex, in a matter of an hour, an hour and a half.

The one other thing that I think helped us is that, in many of them, not too many of our workshops originally, we would have one extra day after the workshop where we would invite people to come and have a consulting session with us on how they could use liberating structures to address whatever it is that they wanted to bring to us. And people would sign up for half an hour or an hour, and they would come, and people would come with anything and everything.

I mean, the range of subjects, from personal things to business things, you know, whether it was marketing, organization, management problems - you name it, anything. And there has never been one single occasion where the conversation didn’t lead to something useful that they could do that would make it, that would help them address whatever they were confronted with, by using one or more liberating structures.

Lisa: It’s really interesting to me that - because I think when I first started out doing this work, I, like many people I think, stumbled into this trap of thinking that to find new ways of working, we have to reject anything that has a whiff of hierarchy, for example. So anything that looks like a structural process is like, look, no, that’s that’s more of the old stuff that we don’t want anymore.

And I think liberating structures have really helped me learn that structures are, paradoxically, really helpful for being containers for all of this kind of human messy stuff. And I, like you, have been in a room and experienced a complete shift in energy and agency just from people being able to - I like this phrase “let the structure take the strain.” Then these liberating structures can contain all manner of kind of heavy and difficult and messy things, and somehow sort of help people navigate them and come out the other side empowered to do something about it.

Henri: Your beauty, well there’s nothing more beautiful than that. I can’t find anything that…

There is something which I think makes a big difference regularly, and that is that if you use the structure properly, you have to start with clarifying what it is that you’re trying to do, what’s the purpose, what’s the - you know, what’s the purpose for the community. What are we trying to accomplish here? And so that part, very often, is never done when people work together. It’s sort of assumed, or it is something that is not specified, or it is expressed in terms of the purpose of some portion of the community or some individual or that kind of thing.

That’s a big thing. Having done that, you then have to say, “okay, now that I have clarified this, what do I do? How do I…? And who should be involved?” And that “who” thing, which involves people in the process that otherwise would never be involved… Those two things together - having clarified the objective and bringing a bunch of people that otherwise would not be involved - inevitably, almost, end somewhere else than otherwise would have happened. And this is where we talk, we keep talking about surprise. And very often this is what happened.

I mean, those consulting sessions, we very often ended up someplace nobody had anticipated. And that was hard to - on that process, and that’s the richness. Because in a way, you know, if you’re gonna do something different to end up in the same place, it’s not very exciting.

Lisa: And I’m not - um, I think if we take like a really practical example like strategy, which traditionally is, you know, a group of chosen few top leaders, maybe in a dark cave, working on a strategy, and then they kind of come out and say “here it is.” Keith, I know you’ve just written this blog about liberating strategy, so how would liberating structures - for the benefit of our listeners, how would liberating structures transform how organizations do strategy as an example?

Keith: One is, you can include - they scale, so you can include ridiculous numbers of people. And you just repeat the same pattern of a string of liberating structures, which we talked about earlier, that they all generate something that feeds into the next one. So the the biggest difference probably is hearing all the voices.

The second difference is it’s this cycle that we start with. There’s six questions. It’s easier to read about and talk about, maybe, but start to purpose: what’s the deepest need you serve? Why is your work important? Once you’ve answered that and answered it well, we’ve started to also be clear about not only what the deepest need, but what in the world do you need to stop, and what do you need to start? What’s the new shiny thing? And just as powerful, or more powerful, is what do you exist to stop?

So liberating structures exist to stop mindless or unwitting exclusion, unwitting stifling of new ideas, soul destroying meetings. It’s just easy to do that. It’s over that. No one needs to do that any longer.

So in a strategy session, you get clear on purpose. Then, what’s critical and uncertain about the environment in which you are? So “Critical Uncertainties” is a really lovely, really simple liberating structure. Then, what paradoxical realities do you need to face up to that you’ll avoid unless you say it out loud? So we use “Wicked Questions” - simple way to talk about, “Oh man, how can we need both of these things because they’re opposites? How can we be more integrated and more autonomous?” To your point about, you know, all hierarchy is bad. Well, no, some integrated small number of very integrated things and a whole bunch of autonomous things.

Then, where are we really? Are we doing - are we getting what we need from each other? So “What I Need From You” is a delightful liberating structure full of dynamite and drama. Then, what do we hope - what do we hope for each other? What’s possible now that we’ve done this work? What do we see? “25/10 Crowdsourcing” is a great way to do that. So each of these things.

And then the “Ecocycle Planning” - how, what are we gonna do, and how we gonna evaluate the work as we go? How we’re gonna keep this moving? So ecocycle planning, oh my god, it’s so powerful. That’s at the heart of of this. So that’s a string that helps you include everyone in strategic planning and strategy making across the organization.

And that means that people own it. You don’t - the dark cave, the people in the dark cave don’t come out and - there’s no signal coming out of the top, smoke signal. There’s no need to bribe people to adopt that strategy. There’s no need to try to adapt it to local situations in which it does not fit. This - it’s caterwauling as far as I can tell. But like the “we must be integrated,” which is all control - “everything needs to be integrated and aligned.” The alignment imperative: “here we need to be whatever the word - one,” and then the company name is, you know - that’s all about control, trying to over-control strategy. So here, all that can disappear.

Henri: A couple of things that your question made me think of - the first one is that if you do strategy using a liberating structure, you’re gonna start, whether you want to or not, with clarifying purpose to start with. And the probability that something will come that either existed but nobody was paying any attention to it, or something will come that is different from the current emphasis of the organization, is very high. So that already puts you on a very different track. So even if you didn’t do anything else, you already have changed your strategy if you’re going to address that purpose that is going to come out of those conversations that need to happen in conversations that it, you know, that is sufficiently inclusive that it is not the dark cave kind of thing. So that’s the first thing.

The second thing that is likely to happen is that along the way, you will quickly discover that what needs to be done, the people in charge don’t know what to do, or how to do it, because if they knew, they would have been doing it. And so one of the reasons why, when you’ve come up with a purpose that is really powerful and surprising to some extent, then the reason why this is not really the focus is because people don’t know how to do it. And so it needs to be figured out. So there is innovation that is required. This is the question, not just, you know, doing more of what we have done and just a slightly different mixture - you know, put more mustard than drop the soya sauce. That’s not quite it. You really have to innovate.

And so then the question goes, “okay, so where is that going to come from? Where is that innovation going to come from? Where is it going to emerge? Who needs to be involved? Who are the people who actually are in a better position? Who actually may know something?” And usually they’re not at the top, and they are not with some big consulting company that you can hire for millions of dollars.

And so that’s - I’m not gonna say more, but this is very often the kind of thing that is gonna happen. You discover that you have to innovate, and the only way to innovate is to include the people that are in a position to do that, and let them try, let them experiment, because you’re dealing with things where you don’t know, you cannot know ahead of time that this is the right thing to do. And that already is a very different kind of strategizing when you accept the fact that you have to try different things. That’s of course - the strategy, we know what to do.

Keith: I think that happens almost inevitably. Would you… I try to be a kind and loving person.

Lisa: Of course, yes.

Keith: Because I like to have fun with this, so we’re in the middle of a strategy workshop. It happened multiple times, but we’re just doing like the “Critical Uncertainties” which reveals plausible futures. You’re not going to predict the future, so you’re gonna have to operate in unsurprising futures, and you generate strategy for each of those futures.

And always, the senior executives are in the room with all the other people, and I’ll gather them around their first version that sees the first blush of the strategies for each of these plausible futures. And I’ll go, “You knew this, you knew - you thought of all these strategies in these futures, right?” Oh god, the look on their face, and they’re - the ones that I admire will admit, “We didn’t think of that, we have all of our eggs in one…” The reality is, almost every group has all their eggs in one basket because they never had a way to distribute examination and share, creating something out of their group’s experience. So they have this little basket of eggs. It’s either a slightly rosy or a slightly dark future - a single rosy or dark future. And in that, and that makes them incredibly vulnerable.

And in that vulnerability, I poke it, and I say, “Well, you knew this, right?” Because I don’t want them to go back to assuming now that they - you know, it’s easy to fall off the horse again, or snap back to the old, “Well, we know and we don’t really know. We don’t need to ask anyone again. We did it this one time, we distributed exploration or strategy making for this one time at this retreat. Oh, that’s cool, now we’ve done that, aren’t we cool?”

But no, I want them to recognize that they’re never going to have it figured out. They always need everyone. And the idea that this work needs to be continuous. And one really cool thing - sorry - just trained a bunch of the liberating structures are actually - both help you see what’s possible, they see where you are, and they make it possible to track that over time.

So like the ecocycle, lots of companies use it every quarter. “What I Need From You,” a set of agreements made to each other for what you need across functions, you can do that every quarter or every half year. “Critical Uncertainties,” if you’re in a fast-moving market, you should refresh what’s critical and uncertain and what those futures are and what your strategies might be. So each of those has an ongoing evaluative quality to it, which I think when we started, Henry, I didn’t - I thought people might do that, but it’s actually a natural way to both evaluate where you are and move forward periodically.

Henri: Well, I’m gonna jump to a couple of different things because you make me think of something quite important. One of them, since you were talking about strategy, one of them - and this is I’m talking about personal experience, my personal experience - is that mostly government organization are not good at all, and that’s probably being kind, as dealing with major trouble when something happens that is significant, that puts them in trouble. It’s a real difficult situation or decisions that are not part or all part of the planning kind of thing. They are not prepared for that, and therefore they have to deal with this as an emergency.

That is one thing that doing this kind of work using the structure gives you a chance to prepare for, at least it opens the door for you to do it because it invites you to create the scenario that is like that and say, “okay, this happens, what are we gonna do?” Perhaps instead of crashing. So this is a big thing, and I have lived through this, and we were talking about this example with Vioxx. A disaster alright. So that is one - that’s one of the things that is very difficult.

I think for most people to appreciate about liberating structures, because they are so simple, is to see how powerful they are as a basket, as a whole, and to imagine the possibilities of what they would be able to do, what they could do if they were to use them as a whole, regularly, routinely, etc. The example that Keith was giving you, for instance, that sort of appreciation - I think it takes a good amount of practice and probably a reasonable amount of insight and imagination or whatever to really see the potential of those structures, and to see how they could transform the way an organization functions in work on an ongoing basis on any number of different dimensions and subjects.

So it’s not - it’s so easy, relatively easy for people to see, “oh, this is simple, I can do that,” and to use those here and there in some meetings or when there’s a special gathering or whatever. But to start functioning that way, to start thinking that way, to start really - that’s a different - that’s another level.

Lisa: I wanted to ask actually, you know, for people who are listening who had never heard of liberating structures before and, you know, are really curious now and want to start trying them out - what would your advice be? Like, how can they - what’s the easiest and most effective way to start experimenting with liberating structures?

Henri: Just do it. Best advice is to really start using them together with some other people and start experimenting and seeing the possibility and keep moving forward, adding and trying and, you know, trying to gradually extend the practice.

One of the things that I have stated a number of times, which is sort of looking at it backwards, is to also look at the structure and say, “okay, I’m gonna try it, I’m gonna use this structure. Start from the structure.” So start from what you’re doing is one way, and the other way is to start from the structure and say, “okay, I’m gonna use the structure to see what I can do with it, to learn, to try, to play with it and see what I can do with it.”

You don’t have to make sense of it. It’s a little bit like - I know that Keith doesn’t care for the word “tool,” but it’s like, you know, some of them are fairly - I wouldn’t say sophisticated, they’re simple, but they are sophisticated in their impact. Until you do it, you don’t - like Keith was talking about “What I Need From You,” well, until you do that a bunch of times, you don’t really appreciate the difficulties involved for the participants and what to do to do it well, etc.

And the potential - you can’t imagine the contribution that these structures can make until you actually experience it, because it doesn’t make sense. It doesn’t make sense. It’s like the story I was telling you about using the Café. I was flabbergasted. If I hadn’t lived through it and somebody told me that story, I wouldn’t believe it. It’s nonlinear. It’s - it’s an emergent property of a certain pattern of interaction. And so, you know, after you do it, you can sort of look back and sort of make sense of it to a pretty good extent, but it’s not a priori.

Keith: So I want to jump in on the “get started.” There’s some fears associated with it at the beginning and all the way through now, for me, other spheres, and you’ve got to overcome them. And overcoming them has something to do with how privileged you feel at this moment in time. So where is it that you feel privileged enough that you can bring in a really different way of interacting, of organizing?

And some people - there was a young woman at Microsoft. She had a group of 750. She’d come to a Seattle user group, she learned “25/10 Crowdsourcing,” the next week she did “25/10 Crowdsourcing” for this idea generation, a single liberating structure for that group - wildly fun, successful, great. There probably things - I wasn’t there, but I know what happened, that happens all the time. So for one reason or another, she felt privileged enough to say, “let’s do this right here.”

And the fear for somebody starting is “I’m going to look disorganized, I’m gonna look unprepared because I’m asking a question. I’m not giving a PowerPoint presentation where I’m telling you my answer. I’m actually flipping my answer into a question that we’re all going to explore.” And so, if you can look a little bit that - in our culture, that looks - business, primarily Western - let’s just say the way we currently organize - that makes you look a little disorganized, a little bit like “don’t you know what the answer is?” It’s okay, or “it’s gonna be chaos.” Or - that’s okay.

Here’s a better - all the way at the other end, all of a sudden - I hate some days I think like I have no expertise at all anymore, zero. I’m obsolete. I’m making myself obsolete by these methodologies that help people organize themselves. Only thing I’m doing is helping people discover. And at one point, I thought it was a pretty serious know-it-all, a strategy consultant. I really, you know, that was my goal - business school and so forth. I’m gonna be the brain at the top of the organization. Well, that’s other nonsense, but now I still have to manage the fear, “do I - is there anything that I offer now that the group is discovering for themselves a direction, they’re shaping their own - they’re simultaneously and mutually shaping their own destiny? And what role do I have in that once they learn the structures?” I need - I’m no longer useful, but let’s - it will take a while to learn the structures.

Lisa: What, you can do another interview with Lisa after that.

Keith: That’s well, I’m just saying what fears are. I’m not saying they’re rational.

Henri: So let me add one thing. I said something, and then Keith talked about the structure. But there is another aspect that I think is fundamental, and that is the people thing. It makes a huge difference when someone starts getting interested in using the structure - how he or she will partner with other people and will bring other people into the process.

And the more anybody that is attracted to structure, the more they bring some other people together with that, the easier it will be - if nothing else to start with - in terms of learning to do that with somebody that can watch what you’re doing, give you feedback, and vice versa. You partner with them in doing things, and they have a lot of experience. That’s ourselves. Doing things as a duo is an enormous difference in terms of support, learning, comfort - you name it, not feeling so exposed, etc. And so that aspect is also something that is not instinctive for most people.

Lisa: I want to ask you both sort of in closing - I mean, I feel like there’s so much more we could talk about, and I think maybe we have to have a whole other conversation about liberating structures in education because I know that’s something that’s also really interesting. But we’ve mentioned that you now have this growing global community of liberating structures practitioners and user groups. There’s an app now. What do you hope will happen with liberating structures going forward in the future?

Henri: Well, I, you know, we wrote something about it in the book about that, and that’s still my dream. And I think in some way it’s gonna happen, not necessarily under that label but some other things. What I hope is that everybody will learn at least a small number of them that they can use for the rest of their life, because they are so basic to help people interact with each other, the same way as it’s pretty common for people to learn how to make presentations or slides or whatever, or to write a memo and that kind of thing.

We think that they are so - I mean, “1-2-4-All,” how complicated is that? Or the “Troika” and that kind of thing. And so, so what I hope is that… you were talking about education, what I hope is that teachers will use them routinely, starting at the lowest level in school, and that kids will get exposed to them as a result of that, just sort of by itself, and they will learn them without having to learn them because they were just exposed to it on a daily basis. And so they will propagate that way. That’s what I hope.

What label will be on them, what name will be on that, I have no idea, whether they will still be called liberating structures or somebody will reinvent them and put their own name, call it whatever. But I cannot - I can’t see why they wouldn’t spread because they are so simple.

Keith: That’s great, but it has to be everywhere in the world, in every - normally Henry doesn’t have a small hope for the world. It’s everywhere for everyone.

So I want to - I do want to - I’d love to chat more about schools. So I’ve had a few experiences with schools now, mostly higher education, more than a few experiences, and even some high school, elementary. It’s pretty easy to introduce these things. But one school in particular, Kaos Pilots in Denmark, I don’t know if you’re familiar with it. They were kind of ready for lift for the “how to” part, like they’d been really into self-managing, self-organizing.

Studied up a couple years ago, I was invited into one of their classes to just introduce liberating structures. We formed a little ensemble of students that would co-lead, and their designer - they call their faculty designers. We did a good job, and you know, they were getting started, and I’m there and just loving the energy of the school and leadership and students.

We’re about 90 minutes into a three-day shindig workshop, and the two students who are with me, they get a feel for how the “1-2-4-All” impromptu… We did a couple things and we’re getting some stuff, and it was really clear. They just kind of looked at me, you know, tilted their head the littlest bit and said, “Keith, we’ve got this.” And I felt, you know, this little twinge of “back off” or “thanks.”

That very thing I was talking about earlier, where “we don’t need you anymore.” And I proceeded - it wasn’t just that time, but another experience - to do things that adults… I’ve waited adults to do these things for years or ten years, and they did them as, you know, in their 20s or early 20s. They did them immediately. As far as you want to see people have freedom and use it responsibly, there’s more freedom and more responsibility.

They were able to ask for what they need from each other, get what they need. When they didn’t get it, they’d say - all the kinds of things you want in a mature organization. They - Kaos Pilots - they give people, the students, a chance to organize their own learning, truly from the ground up. And I was like, no, I’ve never - I went to an alternative school where that… I didn’t shape my own education. I had some more freedom than most people, but this took my breath away. And it gave me confidence that young people can pick this up at the speed that Henry is imagining, at the speed and the depth.

Lisa: That’s wonderful. Thank you both so much for your time today and for sharing your insights about liberating structures.

Keith: Thank you, Lisa.

Henri: Thank you for having us.