How to transform online meetings into memorable experiences using Liberating Structures
Photo by Timon Studler on Unsplash
Changing the experience of meeting online
During the last two years, staff and partners at Conflux have been changing the experience and outcomes that our customers’ software delivery teams have when they meet online. These meetings might be arranged to have conversations about their work, or consider topics like operability, engineering practices, or Team Topologies. In this article we’ll explain how we’ve been bringing intentional design and participatory methods to the way we convene teams, to transform the results they get when thinking and working together in groups.
To help illustrate our approach, we’re sharing some of our experiences helping software teams in a large North American telecoms company to improve the reliability of their digital products and services. One of our areas of focus with this particular customer has been to help create the conditions that would allow teams to adopt, spread, and sustain foundational good technical practices.
In this post we’ll explain a set of principles we’ve used, referencing a set of methods called Liberating Structures, and walk through some examples that I, Mike Rozinsky and the rest of the Conflux team have delivered in the field. We’ll talk about general mindset, some basic building blocks, such as 1-2-4-All, and powerful structures for building trust and inclusion like Troika Consulting.
Inviting a fresh perspective on how ‘knowledge work’ works
Even before the pandemic, the standard response to meeting overload was usually to call for fewer meetings — to simply stop using synchronous communication as a golden hammer to hit every organizational nail. But now the “Zoomed out” workforce have other issues to think about too, such as fatigue and the sociological significance of the tools we use on a daily basis.
But what else is important right now? What are we still missing?
It’s true that many people have a sense of loss regarding in-person spontaneity and office kitchen small-talk, but actually the challenge is much bigger than this.
Essentially the way we come together at work has been so unrewarding, for so long, that almost everyone is now looking down the wrong end of the telescope at what the true nature of collaborative knowledge work even is, or what matters when we’re doing it.
This is why we’ve been inviting our customers to overcome their meeting ennui for a moment to imagine the ways in which our work gatherings could serve us better in creating connection, making meaning, or taking action. What might become possible if both our online and offline meetings were carefully designed with intent, purpose and awareness of structure from the outset?
Stop transmitting, start communicating
“The great enemy of communication, we find, is the illusion of it.” — William H. Whyte
Poor ‘communication’ is often used as a catch-all description for many organizational symptoms. Digging a little deeper, what you may notice is that we often transmit in organizational life, but genuine communication is rare.
The absence of meaningful communication can occur anywhere, but is particularly obvious in larger, cross-functional and cross-disciplinary gatherings where agenda planning is a game of filling the slots with the main objective being to broadcast information in a single direction. Lengthy presentations drain energy and enthusiasm from the group, and if any voices do speak up in Q&A at the end it’s probably the same voices everyone is used to hearing.
Cross-team gatherings present the biggest opportunity for organizational learning, peer support and human connection at scale. Sadly these moments are usually wasted, leaving overloaded participants to disengage, tune out or multi-task on other things (as video conferencing conveniently makes possible).
In our work with our telco customer, the Conflux team noticed some quite distinctive team dynamics, with certain roles being more vocal than others during discussions. A lot seemed to be left unspoken below the surface, which made us wonder what we could do to lower the threshold for participation to include more people?
Guiding the path of conversation
The act of convening is to create space for thinking and conversation. Through our design process we are trying to shape the container in which a particular flow of thinking can occur. A way to imagine this flow is to think about how to travel from the initial invitation, when participants first become aware of the gathering, all the way through to debriefing and reflection on what happened after the event.
We choose to begin framing a design by exploring the answers to some opening questions:
How many people do we have, and how much time?
What tangible outputs do we hope for?
What intangible outcomes do we hope for? e.g. What is it important for the participants to experience?
After considering these questions we’re ready to sketch out the flow for how we want our gathering to work.
Working with divergence and convergence
A particularly useful model for designing gatherings is Sam Kaner’s Diamond of Participation, referred to in Art of Hosting as the ‘Breath Pattern’. In this pattern the participants move through divergence, emergence and convergence.
Image Credit: The Facilitator's Guide to Participatory Decision-Making. By Sam Kaner, with Lenny Lind, Catherine Tolda, Sarah Fisk and Duane Berger
Divergence is where everyone opens up to new possibilities — the intake of breath.
Emergence is also known as the ‘groan zone’. You may not have named this before, but you will have felt it. It’s the part of the meeting where you might feel tension between various ideas or tracks of thought that are competing for attention. Sometimes this discomfort goes unspoken, or perhaps someone with structural power might express their frustration. e.g. “We just need to pick a course of action and get on with it..”
Convergence, the final stage where everyone moves towards shared understanding or a point of conclusion, is the act of breathing out.
Basic building blocks
The question of how to boost psychological safety is a common issue amongst many teams and organizations who are trying to improve. A lack of psychological safety emerges as tumbleweed during online meetings, when there is a barrier to speaking up. One example is when open questions are posed to large groups, creating a high threshold for participation. We’ve found that three simple changes can have a transformative effect on participation in most gatherings:
Having time to think (and write) alone.
Being part of a smaller group which encourages more intimate conversation and makes it easier to speak up.
Inviting the whole group to reconverge and “see itself”, by sharing highlights of the collective conversation and reflecting on what just happened.
In a simple meeting design, we’ll often just work with these components in a lightweight sequence, to create a space for dialogue. When we have more time available, these components expand into larger structures which serve particular outcomes.
Including and unleashing everyone, using 1-2-4-All
What was the context?
Conflux was invited to help a team of agile coaches and members of the PMO conduct a 90 min retrospective debrief on a large internal workshop they’d recently held. We started putting together a design that would bring something fresh to the way this group reflected on their work together.
How did we do it?
Part of our design for this retro used 1-2-4-All, and we mention it here as an example of how LS focuses, refines and filters collective thought. It’s one of the best known Liberating Structures methods and it forms a building block of many others.
The structure begins with each person taking 1 min to write down their thoughts - just what comes to mind immediately. Then the participants are arranged into pairs for a further 2 mins to compare notes. The pairs are merged into groups of four and compare again for 4 mins. Finally, everyone returns to plenary to hear the summary from each group of four.
The choreography of 1-2-4-All can be tricky online. It’s traditionally been overly laborious to run a full 1-2-4-All online for large groups, due to the problem of merging breakout pairs into fours in most video tools. On this occasion our expected number of participants was 15-20 and we were using Google Meet which allows for quick drag & drop of participants, so we choose to run a full version of the structure.
What were the outcomes?
The magic of Liberating Structures is to do the ‘heavy lifting’ of embracing and leveraging complexity in groups of humans. The work 1-2-4-All does for us is to create human relatedness while simultaneously refining and improving the quality of what is being expressed. People open up more naturally, and the conventional power dynamics of the group can be adjusted. Building from individual thought up to the whole group makes sure every voice is heard and integrated into what the whole group hears. The purposefully fast nature of 1-2-4-All can feel unsettling at first, but the value becomes more apparent with some practice.
We used 1-2-4-All three times in total during our retro session, to process a sequence of questions. As the group considers each question (e.g “What caught your attention about the workshop?”) via this structure it creates a powerful amplification of the most important observations, while highlighting those from quieter voices in the group that might not ordinarily be heard, and simultaneously building a mesh of human connections through conversation within the group.
Think for a moment about how this contrasts with a facilitator simply posing an open question to the entire group in a single virtual space and inviting them to respond directly. If there is no prior thinking time or internal trust building within the group, and no particular attention paid to potential of vulnerability and power differences...what do you think is likely to happen?
Inclusive, cross-functional problem solving with Troika Consulting
What was the context?
Our telco customer has a bi-weekly online ‘Technology Forum’ event in which all members of development teams come together to learn more about particular topics from a small number of speakers. This open invite gathering often has between 70-90 attendees from a variety of roles including developers, architects, designers and UX specialists, scrum masters and product owners.
The Tech Forum has conventionally been presentation style with Q&A, but the results of a survey had suggested that people would like to experience more discussion about technical problems that were relevant to them. Seeing an opportunity to serve this group, Conflux offered to design and host one of the Tech Forums to experiment with new patterns of interaction, learning and peer support.
How did we do it?
The centerpiece of our Tech Forum design was a Liberating Structure called Troika Consulting in which breakout groups of three people take it in turn to share a problem that matters to them (as the ‘client’), and receive advice and support from the other two members of the group (the ‘consultants’).
The complete list of steps is:
Participants reflect on the challenge they plan to share
The first client shares their question. 1-2 min.
Consultants ask the client clarifying questions. 1-2 min.
Client turns off camera and listens carefully
Together, the consultants generate ideas, suggestions, and coaching advice. 4-5 min.
Client turns their camera back on and shares what was most valuable about the experience. 1-2 min.
Groups switch to the next person and repeat steps.
What were the outcomes?
One of the most powerful things about Troika is its potential for building trust and relatedness, even amongst complete strangers. Everyone has equal opportunity to be heard and to share their thoughts. The results can be surprising, as unimagined solutions can emerge and it becomes apparent that everyone has something valuable to contribute regardless of their role or functional silo, whether they are a senior executive or a junior developer.
As a ‘client’ in Troika you gain new insights from having to clearly state your problem and respond to questions, and refined listening skills as you focus your attention on the two ‘consultants’. This can be done with the client’s camera turned off to help the consultants to speak a little more freely without being distracted by the client’s reactions.
Some comments from the participants included:
“You got to work through a problem that maybe you knew the answer to, but it gave a chance for you to vocalize all the reasons it's complicated and nuanced.”
“I was able to get some feedback on a problem, and it was good to hear that the group had similar feedback to the solution that I came up with”
“I got to talk about tangible technical issues which is not my regular day-to-day. Could happily use this for “driving idea generation” on current platform projects”
Continuing to design better conversations
“How do you change the world? One room at a time. Which room? The one you're in” — Peter Block
Changing the way people come together at work has huge potential for improving outcomes and Liberating Structures has become one of our most important tool boxes for doing this. We’re always excited about the opportunities to create intentionally designed gatherings in the organizations we work with.
As the Conflux team continue to apply these design and facilitation methods, we are often newly amazed how they can counteract default group dynamics and shape the flow of meetings to bring about genuine, useful conversations. Regardless of the topic, the opportunities to connect horizontally with other participants also improve the quality of relationships and increase the chances of deeper understanding.
Are you ready to try something new in your meetings too?
