What are liberating structures in Agile?

Liberating Structures, curated by Henri Lipmanowicz and Keith McCandless, are used to create ease during meetings and planning tasks. It's a selection of 33 alternative structures that help facilitate individual interactions. It may help develop a more effective Agile model by boosting team ability by focusing on individuals and improving their skills to communicate better in a group.

Explanation

The above illustration explains the working model of the Liberating Structures. It's a graph with four planes that illustrates all sorts of communication in a team. Person-to-person communications do not lead to higher goals and are restricted to primary purposes like presentations, status reports, and managed discussions.

Liberating Structures allow people to work in a team with better communication, good interactions, and a better working environment. A team can work better by following all the 33 Liberating Structures and therefore creating a more effective Agile process.

Menu for Liberating Structures

Some of the essential Liberating Structures are:

• Impromptu Networking: Involves rapid sharing of challenges and expectations and building new connections.

• 1-2-4-All: Involves engaging every team member in creating new questions, ideas, and suggestions.

• Appreciative Interviews: Involves discovering and building on the root cause of success.

• Heard, Seen, Respected: Involves practicing deeper listening and giving importance to teammates' opinions.

• Open Space: Involves liberating inherent actions and leadership in large gatherings.

Real-time example

Jazz exemplifies how Liberating Structures have made things easy for the team. Using the rules of Liberating Structures, jazz musicians can now play together—those who have never met or seen each other before can jam together (Lisa Kimball).