Hey Reader,

Last Thursday I talked about four liberating structures that you can run in person and remotely to create more participation and engagement in your meeting.

I love using liberating structures in my meetings, whether it's a workshop, a webinar, or just a simple retrospective.

What I especially like about these exercises is how easy it is to get started.

Just in case you are not sure what liberating structures are, in simple terms, they are just easy-to-facilitate exercises that you can use to get everyone to participate.

I walked through these four examples in my video: 1-2-4-All, Shift & Share, 25/10 Crowd Sourcing, and Mad Tea.

As I mentioned in the video (in case you didn't watch it - why???), I'm sending you some additional information explaining how to run these exercises. Feel free to just copy and paste it into your wiki.

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1-2-4-All

You will need about 15 minutes for this exercise if you also want to have a debrief with the whole group.

First, you need to define your key question for the participants to answer or brainstorm on. This exercise works great for when you want to collect many ideas from the group.

1. Ask the participants to think individually and in silence about the question and note their ideas. Give them 1-2 minutes for this.
2. Ask the participants to form pairs and continue to expand their lists. Give them 2-3 minutes.
3. Ask pairs to join into groups of four and continue to expand their lists. Give them 4 minutes for this part.
4. Ask everyone to put up their notes on the whiteboard if facilitating in person, or otherwise you'll see all of the ideas on the online whiteboard. Give the participants a couple of minutes to review.
5. During that time group any notes that seem to be similar. Highlight any points that you find particularly insightful.

This exercise will most likely need to be followed up with something else. Usually, some kind of selection-type exercise. Just a big list of ideas is not very helpful unless you do something with it.

In this case, you can run a quick dot-voting session. Or if you want to continue using liberating structures, you should also check the Mic Spec exercise.

You can use this exercise during the retrospective in a couple of ways:

• During the initial ideas and topics brainstorming. Ask questions like "What meaningful events happened during the last Sprint that we should discuss?"
• To help create action items, especially if the team is struggling to come up with ideas for a particularly important topic. Ask questions like "What can we do personally to minimize this pain point?"

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Shift & Share

The next liberating structure on my list is Shift & Share. This is a great way to go over multiple topics with a bigger group of people in a short amount of time.

It works well for when the team needs to explore several topics in detail, maybe preparing some action plans for each topic.

Make sure that you have a working space prepared for every group. In-person it may mean having a flipchart and a set of markers for each group. In a remote setting, it may mean having a designated space on the online whiteboard for every group.

You can run this exercise after the voting session at the end of the 1-2-4-All where you have pre-selected several topics of discussion.

1. Start by splitting participants into groups of 4-5 people.
2. Ask every group to select one topic to work on from the pre-selected list. Every group should work on a different topic. Give participants a minute to make a decision as a group.
3. Give the participants 8-10 minutes to work on a presentation of sorts on their topic. It can be an action plan, an experiment, an approach to solving a problem, and more. The key here is to keep it action-oriented. Though, it's not necessary as you may use this exercise in many cases.
4. After that ask the participants to give a quick 1-minute presentation of what they have prepared to the rest of the group. Make sure you time it as you want to keep it short and sweet.
5. Ask the group to rotate. For the next 5 minutes, each group works on a different topic that already has been worked on by others. They are free to add or change anything.
6. After 5 minutes the groups rotate again and work on a new topic for 5 more minutes.
7. You can do more rotations if you have time.
8. After the rotations are completed, give all participants some time to review everything that has been changed and added to all of the topics and note their key takeaways.

This exercise can be great in your retrospectives (obviously), during the action plan phase.

You can also use it during Sprint Reviews after the demonstration part to collect feedback, where participants discuss what can be improved.

Adjust the timeboxes to fit your needs.

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25/10 Crowd Sourcing

This liberating structure can be used to identify THE most important item on the list. It's especially powerful in person but can be used in a voting-type way remotely.

1. Start by asking a question to identify the best or most important idea. Give the participants about a minute to write down their best idea on an index card.
2. Ask the participants to walk around the room until you say 'Stop'. To make it fun play some music during this bit. During that time they should exchange their index cards with each other without reading what's on them.
3. Once the music ends and everyone stops, the participants can look at what they have written on their card, and on the back of it they write a number between 1 and 5 indicating how good the idea written on the card is (5 being the best).
4. Do 3-5 more rounds of the same.
5. At the end of the last round after everyone has written their evaluation, ask everyone to sum up the results.
6. Ask the participants to self-organize into a line from the highest number to the lowest. Ask the people with the highest number to read the ideas they got on the index cards out loud. This allows you to see which ideas got the highest evaluation and hence should be the best ones according to this group of participants.

.One variation of this came to mind as I was writing this email that may be interesting both in person and online.

1. Start with the same question and ask every person to write down one item, the best idea they have.
2. Then ask participants to pair up and discuss their ideas and choose one out of two - which one is a better one?
3. Then ask each pair to pair up with another pair and do the same thing - choose one out of two ideas that they have now.
4. Now the groups of four pair up with another group of four and select one idea out of two.
5. Keep going until you have the winner.

You can keep a pile of ideas that have been rejected each round to see which ones came close.

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Mad Tea

And the last liberating structure on my list is Mad Tea which is quite simple and very fun to run (at least fun for the participants).

It consists of a set of questions, usually about 6, that build on each other.

1. Prepare the questions but do not uncover them to the participants.
2. Ask the participants to pair up.
3. Uncover the first question and give participants 1-2 minutes to discuss and write down their answers. The best timebox I found is 1 minute and a half.
4. Once the timer expires, uncover the second question and set the timer again.
5. Repeat until you uncover all of the questions.
6. Debrief together with the group. Ask them what insights and patterns they have noticed during this exercise.

This exercise, while extremely simple, is very powerful.

I remember I ran it in one of my online workshops. And when the exercise started, I didn't see too many notes being created on the whiteboard (the participants were in the breakout rooms, so I couldn't really hear their discussions). But the first timebox finished, so I moved all of the participants to the next question and started the timer again. The notes started to appear faster and faster as we progressed through the questions.

When the participants came back after the exercise, they were very energized. They told me that at first it started off very slow and they didn't really have many ideas and had trouble starting out with the exercise.

But since the timebox for answering the questions was so short, it got their creative juices flowing really quickly and they felt that they were able to come up with some great ideas, especially toward the end.

So this can be a great energizer exercise. You just need to have your questions ready in advance.

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Yep, that's all I wanted to cover in this email as an extra to my latest video. If you haven't seen it, check it out in my blog.

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And what are your favorite liberating structures?

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