The Surprising Power of Liberating Structures: Simple Rules to Unleash A Culture of Innovation by Henri Lipmanowicz, Keith McCandless Read Free Book Online

managers take the initiative to remove them, calling on more senior leaders only if needed. As progress on addressing the customer-service situation builds, confidence grows to look for bolder ideas through 25/10 Crowd Sourcing . More innovative approaches emerge and spread within and across units through the strengthened networks. More people are invited to gather information and ideas with Simple Ethnography and to spread these with Users Experience Fishbowls . Frontline people create metrics to measure their own progress, maintain gains, and continue innovating. Good ideas from the outside seep in without any pressure from above.
    Figure 3.3
    Self-Discovery, Inside-Out Change Progression
    Our job as leaders is to remove obstacles and create the conditions for self-discovery and cocreation
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    The principles openly expressed by the leaders in this case are:
“We don’t know how to solve this problem, but the people closest to the work (including our customers) collectively can do it. They are the ones who know what is happening; they are the ones who need to decide to change; they are the ones that will need to sustain momentum and continue to innovate over time. Our job as leaders is to remove obstacles and create the conditions for self-discovery and cocreation.”
    Tapping the Collective Capacity
    The strategy of developing homegrown solutions internally, with or without inspiration or support from outside, requires being confident that they will be more successful than conventional approaches. If such confidence were widespread in organizations, internal development would undoubtedly be the more common approach. Clearly that isn’t the case; otherwise, best practices would not be so popular. Why is that so?
    Two reasons: one, many leaders, no matter their level, don’t realize how smart their organization as a whole is and can be and, two, they and those below them haven’t learned how to liberate and tap their organization’s collective intelligence and creativity. Why is that so?
    An organization’s collective capacity comes in three layers: what the organization knows it knows, what it doesn’t know it knows, and what it has the potential to invent. Only the first layer is visible to leaders and the view is often incomplete. The other two layers are invisible; the knowledge in layer two is there but must be uncovered before its potential contribution can be developed, and layer three doesn’t even exist until successful experiments generate valuable innovations.
    Leaders who are confident about practicing self-discovery believe that layers two and three can be exposed to deliver homegrown solutions that will be successful. They also believe that they and others will know how to unlock those layers reliably time after time. They build widespread faith and confidence in the process through repeated successful experiences at many levels. Creating a growing wave of successes is the only way to build a more self-sustaining and resilient organization that doesn’t continuously depend on external experts.
    Frontline people are no longer left out of the innovation action
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    Groups that discover their innate productive capacity and creativity through the power of self-discovery don’t want to return to having external solutions imposed on them. This is their incentive for developing their own ability to facilitate self-discovery and invite experts only as needed. They own the changes they have to make, which is the best preparation for implementation and adaptation. A look at any of the field stories in Part Three will show that self-discovery is a common thread in all of them.
    Users of Liberating Structures quickly start seeing the drawbacks of conventional microstructures. It becomes difficult to go back once “liberated.” Frontline people are no longer left out of the innovation action. The top no longer decrees solutions to problems. Experts no longer tell people what to do. Resistance to change fades as