Abstract
One-way lectures, status reports, brainstorming, and open and managed discussions can all be tedious, alienating and demoralizing exercises of unbalanced power. We see opportunities to rethink in-person and online interactions across spheres such as workplaces, classrooms, conferences, and movement organizing. We share essential principles of Liberating Structures (LS), a set of 33+ open-source methods for more engaging and effective gatherings. We offer visual illustrations, practical examples, and insights from our experiences using LS for teaching and facilitation. LS, named by action researcher William Torbert and elaborated by Henri Lipmanowicz, Keith McCandless and others, are grounded in complexity thinking (vs. linear machine models), observing that innovation emerges from interconnectedness and non-linear feedback. LS thus attend to “micro-structures” of convenings to better organize participants’ time and attention: the invitation, participant distribution, timing and steps, group configurations and space arrangements. Facilitators can adopt, adapt, repeat and combine methods like Open Space, Troika Consulting, Drawing Together, and Impromptu Networking to support gatherings of any size. We believe LS can ease the work of dismantling oppression and reassembling the new pluriversal worlds we seek, by supporting communities of learning, design and social change in organizing inclusive gatherings, challenging institutional norms, and building alternative visions.
Keywords
liberating structures; complexity thinking; convenings; inclusion
DOI
https://doi.org/10.21606/pluriversal.2021.0015
Citation
Faughnan, M.,and Murphy, L.(2021) Liberating Structures for Pluriversal World-Making, in Leitão, R.M., Men, I., Noel, L-A., Lima, J., Meninato, T. (eds.), Pivot 2021: Dismantling/Reassembling, 22-23 July, Toronto, Canada. https://doi.org/10.21606/pluriversal.2021.0015
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Included in
Liberating Structures for Pluriversal World-Making
One-way lectures, status reports, brainstorming, and open and managed discussions can all be tedious, alienating and demoralizing exercises of unbalanced power. We see opportunities to rethink in-person and online interactions across spheres such as workplaces, classrooms, conferences, and movement organizing. We share essential principles of Liberating Structures (LS), a set of 33+ open-source methods for more engaging and effective gatherings. We offer visual illustrations, practical examples, and insights from our experiences using LS for teaching and facilitation. LS, named by action researcher William Torbert and elaborated by Henri Lipmanowicz, Keith McCandless and others, are grounded in complexity thinking (vs. linear machine models), observing that innovation emerges from interconnectedness and non-linear feedback. LS thus attend to “micro-structures” of convenings to better organize participants’ time and attention: the invitation, participant distribution, timing and steps, group configurations and space arrangements. Facilitators can adopt, adapt, repeat and combine methods like Open Space, Troika Consulting, Drawing Together, and Impromptu Networking to support gatherings of any size. We believe LS can ease the work of dismantling oppression and reassembling the new pluriversal worlds we seek, by supporting communities of learning, design and social change in organizing inclusive gatherings, challenging institutional norms, and building alternative visions.