The Surprising Power of Liberating Structures: Simple Rules to Unleash A Culture of Innovation Read Online Free PDF Page A

avoiding a mess is to put somebody in charge. In a Managed Discussion, someone is in charge (leader, chair, professor) and responsible for guiding the discussion. Managed Discussions frequently come after a presentation or a status report. Their purpose can be to come to a conclusion or reach a decision or make some progress.
    The structural design of the Managed Discussion is:
    The invitation: Participants are asked to respond to specific questions by a person with authority/power.
How space is arranged and what materials are used: Participants sit around a long or U-shaped conference table, or are seated classroom-style, with the leader in the “power seat.” A presenter may or may not remain standing during the entire discussion. For large groups beyond a dozen participants, seating is multitiered.
How participation is distributed: Distribution is determined by the leader, by power relations, by expertise, or by whoever imposes himself or herself.
How groups are configured: The initial configuration remains unchanging. For regular meetings (or gatherings or classrooms), the configuration is usually the same, time after time.
Sequence of steps and time allocation: Total time is determined beforehand by an agenda or decided in the moment by the leader. If addressing the issue requires several steps or tasks, the leader decides, usually in the moment, how time is allocated between each.
    The Managed Discussion puts control entirely into a single hand, with all the difficulties and complications that this entails
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    The Managed Discussion puts control entirely into a single hand, with all the difficulties and complications that this entails. The most common challenge for the leader (or chair, or professor, or expert) is giving to all participants the time they need for comfortably expressing their views. Making it safe for everybody to speak up is another common challenge since acquiescing is the easiest option. Achieving true depth and quality of content within a predetermined amount of time is often impossible.
    Chairing Managed Discussions at senior levels is a special challenge. Even though senior leaders are likely to be more skilled in expressing themselves in group discussions, the issues they address are much more complex and power dynamics tend to be significantly stronger. The boss may want more participation in shaping next steps, but if everyone doesn’t step up, this reinforces the pattern of making decisions at the top. Including participants from lower levels as equal partners in a Managed Discussion with a group of senior people is an art form too often neglected.
    From Too Much Or Too Little Control To Well-Structured and Distributed Control
    By definition, full engagement means that everybody plays an active and unrestrained role in contributing ideas, discussing options, and shaping next steps. The descriptions of the Presentation, the Open Discussion, and the Managed Discussion make it clear how and why conventional structures fail to make this possible. They provide too much control of content or too little structure to effectively engage more than a few people in shaping next steps. In the next chapter , we will describe a Liberating Structure called 1-2-4-All to exemplify how Liberating Structures make it possible to easily achieve full engagement regardless of group size.
    Figure 2.4 provides a visual summary of these differences between Liberating Structures and conventional microstructures. It illustrates that:
    The Presentation puts maximum control of content in the hands of one person and has no structure to include/engage others.
The Status Report is essentially like a series of presentations, putting the control of content into the hands of one person at a time and with no structure to include/engage others.
The Managed Discussion puts into the hands of one person the control for including/engaging a small number of participants.
The Brainstorm provides a structure to include/engage a few people