 Welcome, welcome to liberating structures. I am your servant leader today. My name is Alex slowly So who am I? I'm an agile coach. I'm actually from the United States You can probably tell from my accent Originally from Seattle. I worked at Microsoft for a really long time 15 years at Microsoft too long probably and And then I became like an agile guy and I traveled the world And did a lot of agile consulting and that's all I do now is agile consulting agile coaching agile training And I'm based in Sydney, Australia, and I've done this at a bunch of different companies. I've done agile transformations at Giant companies like Cisco and Intel and I've done it at government and I've done it in nonprofits and I've done it at startups and along my my career path one of the things I really focused on was facilitation and That's what we're going to talk about today because liberating structures has a cool name But all it really is is a set of Facilitation techniques. So this deck is really short because I'm going to show you some slides, but there's not that many slides There is 16 slides in the whole deck Instead what we're going to focus most of our time on is actually practicing these facilitation techniques together today So I hope you're ready after lunch Did do some facilitation All right, so what are liberating structures? These are the two guys that invented it? that's Henri and that's Keith and these two guys are like Management consultant kind of guys they go into organizations and they help them have discussions and They are essentially the inventors of liberating structures and of course Just like inventors of something. What's the first thing they did? They wrote a book Now this is a website known as Amazon. You may be familiar with this, right? There's the book The surprising power of liberating structures. You can go buy that book I'm sure Henri and Keith would be very appreciative if you went out and bought their book Because this is how they partially make their living But this is the age of the internet which means everything is on the internet for free Yeah Seems kind of counterintuitive, right? They write the book but everything in the book is essentially online You can go to their website. It's liberating structures comm and it has all the information you whatever need to know about liberating structures But I'm going to break it down and make it really easy for you today because I'm going to show you how to do some So these are the liberating structures. They look really cute They got cute names and cute little icons all they are is a set of Facilitation techniques. That's all they are It's like if you were a facilitator if you had a toolbox of techniques You could put your hand into and grab something and use right away That's all this is is a set of Facilitation techniques and I'm going to show you a couple today One thing that's consistent with all these techniques is that they are comprised of five design elements In other words when these techniques are described, there's five things That define what this technique is and I'll show you what it looks like so it's super easy for you So what we're going to do is we're going to do a facilitation technique together right now You know immediately pretty much and this is the technique we're going to do It's called one two four all So It's two pages on the website. It's two pages of stuff two pages of description Here's all the stuff you ever need to know about using this technique And if you look on the website, it's got the five design elements You can't really see this too well on this monitor It's not like high def or anything But if you went to this website and looked up one two four all it would have the five elements Which are how you structure the invitation and how many people can be involved how you set up the space It's essentially think of it think of it as a cookbook or a recipe book for facilitation techniques It says in order to do this thing you need to do these five steps or whatever And it gives you time boxes and it's all very mechanical and very easy to do two pages for this one two four all now The trick with any facilitation technique or learning new coaching techniques is to make it as simple as possible and practice So what I've done for you today is I'm going to make it very very simple and then you're going to practice Because this two pages Translates into these five steps. That's it. It's that simple so when you look at this and You go to the website All it is is this five simple steps you go read the facilitation technique and you distill it down to its core elements So what are we going to do today? The first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to structure the invitation Here's the invitation I Want you to think every person in this room. I Want you to think Why you're here today And I don't mean like metaphysical Why am I here in this universe? I Mean like why am I at Agile India today? It's a work day. You've got a family. You've got work life. So why are you here today? and That's the invitation what I'm going to do Is I'm going to give you one minute to think about why you're here and of course like every Agile coach Scrub master. What am I going to do? I'm going to time box it You have one minute to think why you're here. That's your one minute Now the next thing I'd like you to do is You have two minutes to find a partner. You're going to form a team of two and You're going to talk about why you're here How you divide up your two minutes is entirely up to you who you pick as your partner is entirely up to you But I'm going to give you two minutes to talk about why you're here with one other person in this room And of course I'm going to time box it and your time starts now Wow That was some good conversation there Now the next step I'll show you what the next step is You're going to form teams of four and you're going to talk for four minutes about why you're here Right? You can probably see why this is called one two four all now, right? Teams of four four minutes why you're here and your time starts now go You guys want to selfie with Shane? You want to selfie? Go go go go Come on, I guess Wow I heard some great conversations out there today but We've entered the last phase of one two four all We get to share So I'm interested about why you guys are here Who here would like to share about what their group talked about Maybe one or two reasons why you're here today Who would like to be the brave person that can get us started? Oh Please tell us why you're here My name is Anand and this is my first digital conference and the colleagues here in this group One of them is a giant coach Yeah, I think and myself as well Yeah, so as you see they're all in a different spectrum of experience and learning mode already Wow So we are hoping that we can learn a lot from the experience around from attending the sessions And I think the expectation also is in terms of some of the methodologies Some best practices that we can take back and actually implement So one of them being agile coach. She wants to actually go and implement something so The experience and the expectations are At a different level, but yes, we're hoping yeah, that's super awesome. I heard like diversity of opinion Learning new things. Thank you for sharing. That was really awesome. But Shane, I saw you raise your hand back there Why what did your group talk about? Oh my goodness Oh Cool, that's awesome. Who else would like to share about what their group talked about why they're here? Yes Is Yeah Right Yeah Oh, okay. Yeah solidarity with all the struggles that all the agilists have right Agilist anonymous I've been an agilist for five years How about this side of the room? What did you guys talk about someone? Yeah way back there Cool, okay Awesome. Thank you for sharing So I can sense something up here. What's going on up here someone Get someone someone give me something up here. I can I can feel it Give it to me Give it to me. I can wait a long time awesome Oh, interesting Interesting. Thank you for sharing Uh, what I want you to do now Oh I can't resist it. You're so eager. Please go You're standing up to I love that go Yes, go I'm good at that but keep going Yeah Okay, I'm with you there Yeah, that's very nice, thank you for sharing I'm learning the bad habits. Yeah, that's what I use beer for Yeah, well What I'd like you to do all do do now is give yourself a hand because you've just completed your first liberating structure All right So, uh, thank you for sharing. I loved all your stories Um, but the really important part wasn't why you're here Although I do care why you're here. The important part was that you practiced actually doing it now when I'm interested in hearing What were your thoughts about the process? How did it feel? How did it sound? What were your emotions? What are your questions? What are your realizations? What are your aha moments? Not about why you're here, but about this technique What do you guys think? So you think it's all inclusive Everyone's involved That's nice. One of them You think agilist would be good at reflection, right? Yeah Yeah, that first minute is really important Ah the invitation you always structure an invitation And you structure the invitation that that you have as your agenda as an agile coach If you're trying to accomplish something that's the invitation What other realizations or comments or questions? Oh, please Yeah Please Ah Yeah Yeah, yeah, yeah, this technique is actually designed for divergence To get as many ideas from the group as possible. That's what it's designed for We had another comment Yes That's right Right. Yeah, looking inside yourself Yeah, you are a very spiritual man, I can tell That was good. What other questions? Oh up here Ooh It's like you made a connection with the people you talked to That's the way I would describe it. I don't know how you would describe it, but uh Over the years. I've said facilitation techniques are about enabling conversations, but I actually think it's about Having connection Back here. I know we had some comments back here back here Yeah Yeah, absolutely. You just let the group self self organize And you'll have people who are Bumblebees and they'll go around the groups and you'll have butterflies who attract people to them It's whatever works for you guys. And I'm just here to to help you facilitate I don't tell you how to do it But great observations. I really love that Back here. We had another yeah Yeah, that was really nice. You guys did a great job Well, what can I tell you that will add to your observations? um Once again, it's a divergence technique. It's to be inclusive over here. Someone said inclusive. Yeah, thank you, sir It's to get as much from the group as possible You form connections You have a great dialogue. You'll probably find similarities and differences I use this technique all the time in workshops like this. I use it in retrospectives Uh, a lot of my trainings. It's a really great way to get people involved Even uh introverts Are okay with this in general because it's it's small group That gives them a little more safe space to talk You'll notice I didn't really tell you how to self form and I didn't really get upset when you formed groups of three Or five or six, right? I don't worry about it I just kind of give you general guidelines and you and you figure it out and I think you did a great job So there's your first one one two four all And now we're gonna do the next one Oh, we've got more questions Oh You first, please I've never had it fail I do it all the time and people just do it. You'll notice you guys just did it, right? In fact, most of the time the problem is not getting people to start talking The problem I have is getting people to shut up Because once they start talking they want to keep talking Now you said how big a group Probably the biggest group I've ever done this with is about 250 300 people And it was so loud I couldn't even Think it was so loud. It was a giant room 250 300 people they just went crazy About the same as this for one two four all Yeah, it's pretty quick These are really tough to do with distributed teams Generally my recommendation is if you're going to try liberating structures or facilitation techniques The single best way to do it is to have a facilitator in each each location Yeah, generally what I'll do is I'll prepare someone in the remote location to kind of do it alongside with me On a remote connection. You'll get a better result that way You can do it as a facilitator remotely But the time boxes really blow out because you're doing a lot of Like organization through the teleconference essentially Uh, so if you can get train up someone in liberating structures at your remote locations, it makes it a lot easier All right, good job guys. Let's do the next one. That was excellent All right, here we go. Here's your next one. You're going to be practicing this today Um, this is called troika consulting once again. It's on the website troika consulting. It's two pages Right, it's got the five design elements. Here's how you structure your time boxes. Here's the steps Here's who you do it with. Here's how many people here's how you structure the invitation All those design elements are exactly the same as one two four all it's a recipe for a facilitation technique Once again when you read these things you can distill them down to their basic elements Troika consulting distills down to That Right, so don't feel intimidated when you go to the website and look it up. It's this easy Here are the steps for troika consulting now. We've uh, we haven't talked about this yet. What's your challenge at work? Remember my invitation for one two four all it was why are you here today, right? Well now your invitation is What's your challenge at work? I want you to silently reflect For one minute What your biggest challenge at work is one minute What's your challenge at work? There's your time loss Now We're gonna have a little fun I need two victims. I mean volunteers who would like to moment here Oh, you're so brave I'm alex Nice to meet you. I'm alex Okay, what we've got to do is we got it we got to stand like over here So you're not in front of the screen. So come over here over here. That's good. That's good. And everybody see us Yes, okay What we're going to do is we've each thought about our big challenge at work right now We've done that you're going to form teams of three How many people do we have in our team? We have three people in our team. Yes, you're going to form teams of three That's the next step, right? Form teams of three. You're not actually going to do it right now. I'm just going to demonstrate it to you So we formed a team of three and we need one client and two consultants. That's what it says there, right? Okay. Oh, you want to be the client? Excellent So you're the client We're the two consultants Perfect client consultants client consultants. Okay. Okay. That's your your first thing to do the next thing we're going to do Is the client's going to share their challenge at work remember that? And we get to ask the client questions for two minutes Okay, so tell us your challenge at work Do you want to ask a question? After going back, how the changes have to be fixed, is there a way that we measure it? Yeah, we do. There is something called the LMS leadership model survey. So what we do is We first, you know Do a survey with the team to figure out where they are at what stage they are at the beginning of the engagement So in terms of security engineering practices agile product, etc, etc So after six weeks, we measure the same thing again And then we figure out whether they were at one and now they're at two. So it's a good improvement but then That's it. And then we get back. Do you have any more questions? So when you move out of the organization, do you try to ensure that there is someone who has already taken The coaching initiative and is able to work on Okay. All right. That was two minutes Wasn't really two minutes, but just pretend it was two minutes. Okay. Yeah. Yeah, so we ask questions Of the client because we're the consultants. That's what we do. We ask questions, right? Okay. Yeah The next time box five minutes the client turns around So the client you face that way And you and me the consultants We talk about the client behind their back like real consultants Yeah, yeah, so what do you think about the problem? Yeah, I think the problem is regarding sustainability Yeah, she has a big problem What do you think I don't know Maybe some kind of program where they put in a sustained model figure out what a sustained model is a theme book. Maybe Are you a real consultant? Yeah, yeah, we talk about the client's problem and how to solve it as real consultants for five minutes Five minutes the next step the client turns around And we all discuss the solutions because you heard everything we said Right. That's the whole point. You're facing this way and you're listening to us talk about you and your problem and how to solve it All right That's it. You guys did a great job. I want you to give a round of applause to our volunteers. Thank you All right, please take that. Thank you. All right now Don't feel like the time boxes have to be obeyed strictly If your team feels like they can proceed through the steps more quickly perfectly fine go for it But i'm going to ring the bell for each time box Just so you know that you have to move on. Okay So i'm going to go back To the first step we're going to do you've already done that you've already done that You have one minute to form teams of three And pick one client and two consultants and your time starts now You have 10 minutes left There you go, there's my 10 minutes we'll be done Next step next step Next step Next step five minutes He just watching To my leverage There's some good conversations going on Well, I hope you have fun There's another minute of conversation and then I get that sometimes Yeah, I get that sometimes I get jack black a lot too West coast exactly exactly Of course when I grew up in high school nirvana ellison chains pearl jam that was the thing I They're all old men like me now We're on the last step last step That's it. Wow, you guys wanted to talk. Thank you. That was a great conversation I could hear some awesome stuff going on there What you would do now is you would just rotate that roll And you would go around your team and essentially replicate that pattern um I'm going to get through this pretty quickly now because we've got one minute left One minute and I like time boxes So if you have you if you have questions come find me later buy me a beer And I'll answer all your questions Yeah, no, I won't answer without beer. Okay, so we don't have time for this one. This is another one once again It's that simple Right. It's five steps from two pages um I encourage you to mix and match these you string them together And be creative with them. You don't have to follow the rules. You can change them defeat to meet your needs Um, the presentation to the the link to the presentation is in the presentation And they'll share it later. So feel free go check it out Um, and thank you. I appreciate it. You've been a wonderful audience. Thank you very much Now go have fun See you later. Go go