It’s been more than 200 years since the American founding father, Benjamin Franklin, made the famous and now-cliché quip about life’s certainties: “death and taxes.” If he were alive today, there’s a good chance he would add “a general fear and loathing about meetings” to his list.

As a Knowledge and Learning Specialist at Bixal, a large part of my current work revolves around designing and facilitating meetings, and I’m currently embedded in the Bureau for Resilience and Food Security (RFS) at USAID as part of a multi-year, capacity-building initiative called Feed the Future Knowledge, Data, Learning and Training activity (KDLT).

The Bureau has recently undergone a reorganization and is smartly looking for strategic collaboration points within and across its teams. While there are many ways to connect the dots within an organization, from email to shared documents to internal digital platforms, there is no doubt that real-time meetings provide energy and an immediacy that is vital to getting the work done. I was asked to help design and facilitate several retreats to aid this process in the Center for Ag-led Growth and took this as an opportunity to expand my toolkit, where I deployed the concepts of Liberating Structures.

The Concept of Liberating Structures

When I first set out to plan an engaging and productive retreat for a newly formed staff, I did what I often do when looking for creative ideas: Take to Twitter!

In what I now recognize as a fairly auspicious tweet, Maha Bali, of the American University of Cairo, announced an upcoming free workshop on Liberating Structures. It was a delightfully informal introductory session, and after a week of learning about the concept, I was hooked. I was drawn to the simplicity of the robust yet manageable list of 33 core structures for how to lead participatory meetings. I especially appreciated the principles underscoring the structures themselves, notably the first: Include and unleash everyone.

As a practical matter, workplace learning usually sticks best when it connects to an actionable opportunity. My Liberating Structures journey stemmed from a personal need to design and facilitate a staff retreat, among other meetings, that not only would increase personal engagement and satisfaction, but also help my colleagues get the work done. Furthermore, framing my dive into Liberating Structures as a professional learning opportunity was energizing. Each structure I practiced deepened my own expertise while meeting the needs of the staff.

At this point, I needed to figure out which of the 33 structures would be most relevant to our goals. I chose the following three to get started:

• 1–2–4-All: Perhaps the mother of all Liberating Structures, 1–2–4-All features (1) individual reflection and writing, followed by (2) sharing with a partner, and (4) deepening ideas in foursomes, before (All) meeting back as a whole group. Critics may say this is a roundabout way to arrive at the same place. But in practice, this is a powerful structure that supports participant-led co-creation rather than decision-making based on the loudest voices in the (Zoom) room.
• Appreciative Interviews: This structure allows participants to talk about specific approaches that have worked in the past and explore what could be applied in a current context. Appreciative interviews also can be a springboard for identifying common professional connections, which becomes an interpersonal “glue” that helps build rapport across divisions.
• Troika Consulting: The Troika structure unleashes creativity and collaboration. This protocol allows people to share their situation and challenges one at a time, inviting others to give input and solutions. It is fascinating to see how people so readily volunteer to solve other people’s problems, even as they struggle with their own.

Team-building and Productivity

Deploying these structures at the retreat led to increased engagement, curiosity, and interpersonal connection among participants. The structures also helped amplify voices that otherwise would not have been heard through more traditional open structures, creating a more inclusive environment.

What’s especially exciting to me, though, is the prospect of the structures to help build thriving teams. As the authors of The Surprising Power of Liberating Structures suggest, we shouldn’t necessarily focus on transforming culture, but rather hone in on “changing habits — on changing and improving routine practices, behaviors and patterns of interaction.”

While this list of habits might not sound like the most exciting topics to explore with your team, they are arguably the most direct building blocks to team member satisfaction and productivity. I personally believe this is the true power of implementing the structures.

Collaboration and Courageous Curiosity

Collaborating effectively and building relationships on a team can be challenging, even under the best of circumstances, and working in pandemic circumstances is anything but the best of times. Expertise is invaluable, but it doesn’t require an expert to help build the road to better meetings one step at a time.

What it requires are individuals who are interested in change, are a little courageous and a lot curious, and willing to leverage frameworks like Liberating Structures to build new habits with their teams. To quote the German writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe:

“Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it.”

The opportunity to experiment with Liberating Structures was afforded to me, in part, by the adaptive and educational nature of Bixal’s culture. Being able to take these new learnings and directly apply them to my work is evidence of the powerful simplicity of the structures, and makes for an intuitive addition to our existing toolkit to make interactions truly matter.

Think these concepts could work for you and your team? Try it for yourself and let me know how it’s going at michael.weinraub@bixal.com.

Improving Work Culture and Team Dynamics using Liberating Structures was originally published in Bixal on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I’ve shared a few messages recently on Facebook about Hamilton so some folks may know that I’m more than a little obsessed with this most American and modern of musicals. But why does it touch me so, and why now?

Frankly, a host of elements all combine and conspire to slay me > emotionally, aesthetically, musically, philosophically. & I’m thankful to Hillel Broder for helping me, over #ISTE17 drinks, to hone in on some of the subjective agents that may be at work. One, I reckon myself a student of American history with a particular bent for the Revolutionary period. I am in awe of the Founding Fathers/Brothers and yearn to know more about their lives even though I no longer idolize them (that is, make an idol of them for worship, for there is only one entity worthy of worship). I grew up, like so many of my fellow citizens of a certain age, on hip hop, so the lyrical pacings that are at once staccato and smooth fall on my ears in just the right way, like raindrops on good soil. And I’ve always liked musicals. West Side Story and Jesus Christ Superstar were the cultural mother’s milk in some of my early formative years, and I heartily sang the role of Jesus to my brother’s Judas in his bedroom on many occasions growing up. The sentimentality, kitsch, and absurdity of musicals resonate with me strongly, and I don’t know whether this resonance is somehow innate or whether early exposure to the genre caused it. No matter, it’s a part of me now.

Carmiya and I often talk about whether you have to have had a certain experience in order to connect to others who may be going through that, like childbirth, death of a loved one, disease. On one hand, it appears almost obvious that you have to walk in another person’s shoes to fully understand them. Yet I can’t help but think that this position reflects a lack of imagination. Must I have experienced a particular type of loss, say the loss of a child, God forbid, to relate to that experience in another? What does it mean to connect to another person anyway, to understand them?

Ultimately, every object of our attention is like an onion whose layers can be perceived and peeled back. And my experience with Hamilton over the last few weeks is gloriously like this. Each listening reveals something new. Today, on the flight back from San Antonio to DC, I followed the lyrics song by song as I listened to the entire first act. I realized more fully than I had before a series of parallels that unwind as the story unfolds: between Alexander and Eliza. And Burr. And remarkably, tragically, Philip. I cannot see how it is possible for a person to experience Hamilton without gaining an appreciation for the patriots who gave birth to our country, and an appreciation simply for difference. The show paints wholly distinct characters so fully and subjectively that I imagine when on that glorious day that I finally see Hamilton in the theater, clapping my hands at the end so vigorously that my hands hurt, that I will all the while feeling a numb sense of connection to the others in the audience b/c of our undeniable subjectivity & humanness.

And maybe this is why, to me, Hamilton is so sublime. It helps to achieve something akin to meditation. At least, it’s like meditation when I’m doing it “well.” Meditation has the capacity to transform something in us where we are timeless — out of the grip of time and the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves. When we are knowingly outside of our selves and our stories that we might connect most directly, even if only in our minds, to the subjectivity of others, that they experience pain, discomfort, and longing just as we do. And they deserve life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness as we do. That we can help bring this about through meditation or through acting for the sake of others. I think of how Alice Walker describes what Pema Chodron, the renowned and my personally favorite Buddhist nun, has helped her to do:

… how to keep opening wider [her] own heart.

This is what Hamilton does for me, and I love it.

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Originally published at michaelweinraub.wordpress.com on June 29, 2017.