Curious though isn’t it? That sometimes you can just shoot from the hip and go get shit done, and yet others you need to stop, think and sometimes you know, make a god-damned plan. How do you know when you need to do one or the other? 

Let’s Think Slow for just one minute. Considering your situation, question or challenge. Where are you on a spectrum with “predictable” on the left extreme and “unpredictable” on the right? 

If you’re with anyone, find a partner and discuss where each of you believe you are in just one minute per person. If you’re with a larger group of people, join with another pair. Paraphrase your partner to the new pair, invite them to do the same and see if you can synthesize your perspectives as one answer in just 4 minutes. If you’re with more people, go around to each set of four and collect their answers in a minute or less. 

Now divide your spectrum into 4 segments. 

The one on the farthest left is Clear, prolly fine to just go get shit done.

The next one to the right is Complicated. Lots of pieces moving around. If you nerds all locked right into this answer and know how the things fit together, get after it! If not however I’d do whatever your version of Googling shit is or ask GPTetc, because expertise and analysis is advisable here. Take note that if you fuck up and jump to getting things done(GTD) without the requisite expertise here, you’ll kick yourself to the far right bucket called Chaos. 

Chaos, being chaos, the relationships between cause and effect are changing sometimes at different rates over time. Ironically in this context the DOing mode is your godsend. With all this flux at play, it doesn’t make much sense trying to go all smarty pants and figure things out. Just find some decent heuristics and get after it. For example: keep moving, capture the high ground and stay in radio contact. These aren’t prescriptive. They are simple enough to remember and they narrow enough to help you figure out which one to do next.

Now that last ¼, between Complicated and Chaos is… Complex. Complex has lots of unknown-unknowns at play. You’ll need to uncover things as you go. Complex is like groping your way through unfamiliar darkness. Taking your time with small steps, keeping some slack to make sense of the progress you’ve made and how things fit together from time to time. Probe, Sense and Respond to what you sense, is a tried and true search algorithm that will get you through the darkness without banging your toes on any coffee tables.

Now there’s a lot of nifty insights in this simplified variation of the Agreement Certainty Matrix, but that will do to make this point, calling back to our initial question of how do we know when to stop and think vs when to get to the doing:

It depends.

Except for Chaos mode, chaos mode always works, but it will sometimes waste a bunch of energy going in circles(doing the wrong thing) and from time to time push things into Chaos. Which sometimes sucks, because sometimes you just want to chill right? However if you kick ass at the game of fuck-around-and-find-out, and those around you don’t, well then there may be some strategic advantage to inviting Chaos.

But yeah, it depends on the context, as to what the correct course of action is. Pay attention, take notes and ask around. Somebody, or perhaps the sum total of some-bodies, will have the insight of whether it is a good use of time to engage in Process Mindfulness: organizing communication in order to figure out what matters, decide and plan how you want to get something done, before you go get things done. 

Fin.

Post Script:

This post is an unpacking of one pattern useful for Process Mindfulness, the Liberating Structure: Agreement Certainty Matrix. There are remixes and variations on everything, this one is mine. It has been heavily simplified and shares much DNA with granddaddy Dave Snowden’s Cynefin Sensemaking Framework. I would encourage everyone take not of the differences with my adaptation compared to the cannon of both. May many grains of salt be upon you!

https://www.liberatingstructures.com/27-agreement-certainty-matrix/

https://cynefin.io/wiki/Cynefin

Interesting rabbit holes(premises) I’m going to open up(assert) but not go down(explain/defend/argue) here:

4th Industrial Revolution: that there is something significant in adjusting to the digital paradigm that makes these skills of situational assessment essential and how this shift bears an 86% resemblance to the type of embedded ecological thinking I associate with indigenous-ness

Process mindfulness is a radical departure of our cultural understanding of leadership from Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey to squad wealth and group as hero. See Lord of the Rings Trilogy as a recipe for distributed chaordination that: creates a shared map of reality, takes turns leading in often very different ways around different relevant contexts and recruits those close to contexts to respond. We need A-teams of spiritual warriors.

The future of leadership is coaching and facilitation. What these have in common is the skill of guiding inquiry/discovery of relevance realization through the continuous embodied availability of 3rd person metacognition. See artful participation, membership or the awareness of “what does the group need (from me) now?”

Human culture, coordination and collaboration is built mostly out of communication. Whether that be body language, facial expressions and physical signaling, language, conversation and symbols, or more complex forms of software powered stigmergic social computation.

I’m going to focus on language and conversation, because that’s where I’ve been able to find purchase and I see an enormous amount of work to be done that might actually be faster, cheaper and easier to implement than the other two. If you can turn this conceptual exploration into software, good for you, and I’m sure all be interested, but it's not where I’m skillful so LFG

So why does that (shit language, conversation and symbols) matter?

As group creatures humans we are responding collectively to our environmental challenges and opportunities. This seems so obvious but it is extraordinarily complex and challenging. 

So why is it hard?

Blind men and elephants. There is way more information than it is possible to get a grasp on all at once. Even if you add time to the mix and could get a grasp on the whole elephant, you then have yet another impossible challenge, discerning which part of it is relevant for what is happening now amidst the combinatorial explosion of possibilities. 

**What makes these impossibilities significant? **

First is this is a route to epistemic humility. 

Second is that a problem well understood is half solved

**What makes epistemic humility important? **

It may just help us shut the fuck up long enough about what we believe is THE thing in order to listen to one another

Why should we listen to one another?

In order to min-spec sending in order to accelerate the rate of flow of information across the group social/superorganism

**What might that increased flow of information help us do? **

We may just be able to address those impossibilities if we can solve the wicked question of both getting information from each blind man and receiving one another’s information.

If we could answer that wicked question, what might we get?

Relevant information getting to where it is needed at the appropriate time

So what if we do that?

We might drastically decrease the difficulty around deciding what to do

And now what happens if we can decide what to do?

Then we may just be able to do the fucking thing that needs to be done

The Byzantine General’s Information Theory

What are the most critical and uncertain factors of getting the appropriate information where it needs to be at the appropriate time?

This question lights up the technical part of my brain that wants to think about things very analytically. It wants to evoke big smart person things like the Byzantine General’s Problem and then Parallax with Information Theory

The Byzantine General’s Information Theory:

Did my information get to where it was intended to go?

Was it understood how I intended it to be?

The present answer to both questions is:

probably not😭

What would have to be true in order for them to be a solid “fuck yes”? (Let’s bookmark this for later).

All this to qualify what I believe is that the most critical factor can probably be simplified to status, which is always social. This may not solve the “was it understood as I intended?”, but the chances are significantly greater the higher the status of the sender of information. 

This is of course extraordinarily problematic because everyone on the face of the earth knows it to be true. So we play mostly at hierarchies and measuring dicks which takes up a lot of space in the channel of information flow. Coming back to our blind men and the elephant, this is the approximate equivalent of them spamming the feed with clickbait not about what they are sensing but why they should be listened to. This downward spiral into degeneration is an essential ingredient in what Tristan Harris describes as the Social Dilemma and it fucking sucks that yet again it is true. 

So if (social) status of the sender is critical to getting the relevant information to the right place at the appropriate time, then what’s uncertain about it?

I think like so often in life, the answer is in the question: 

relevance of information. 

If this is not the most uncertain thing in the universe then I don’t know what’s relevant. 🥁🥁💥 

But in all seriousness it is damned near impossible to tell in advance what information is relevant to whom. Lucky hunches may be about the best we can do in advance of running the actual check. The crucial questions here have everything to do with context and the receiving end: 

Relevant to whom?

For what purpose?

In the context that every person on the entire planet is playing the status game this becomes not only impossible to sort out but a bona-fide pit of vipers.

But okay we’ve got critical=status and uncertain=relevance. Ordinarily we’d plot these on a 2x2 matrix and make sense of these four scenarios like so:

What happens when my status is high but the relevance of my information is shit? 

I mean we kind of did this one in the 9WHYS:

Social dilemma, clickbait, unfortunately I don’t follow the mainstream media so I have no idea who this is at the moment and don’t feel like embarrassing myself with some disgustingly out of date reference. 

Never mind, keeping up with the Kardashians, Reality TV, Sports TV, Politics TV, TV, you get the idea. Massive output of fucking useless information.

I love the thought experiment of what this landscape is going to look like in 5 years of GPT-infinity powered steroids. The skills of how to ignore and who to trust and how to validate who you trust is not some jackhole spoofing them is going to generate some serious alpha. 

Let’s just call this the “Social Dilemma” Visualize a slam dunk that bounces off yet still shatters the backboard backboard

Next up, an omega with irrelevant information. This one seems funny but it is certainly not. Conspiracy theocracy. Incel’s Unite. Vulnerable minds hijacked and repeating what their “research” has found. Even if you think you’re smart enough to play the game well, you should be more terrified of this category than all others combined. 

Let’s call it the “Zombie Apocalypse” half court airball that blasts you in the face

Next up. Alpha’s with relevant information. Dear God, let us pray for benevolence. There is something so folksy and charming and comforting about this scenario. FDR, Abraham Lincoln, JFK, Mahatma Ghandi, MLK Jr, The Rock, Elon Musk 😂. Wouldn’t it be nice? If Dad would just come home in the nick of time to save the farm from alien robot monsters from the future of outerspace? Edris Elba all

Naruto/Goku/Ichigo/Gilgamesh returns from gaining new special powers just in time to save Uruk from the bull of heaven. Simba/Arjuna accepts his role to return as warrior/king. Somehow this one seems less probable than ever. 

Let’s call it “Hero Savior” game winning 3

Last but not least where I believe most of us find ourselves. Pieces of the puzzle fucking lost in a sea of bullshit. Pearls thrown to swine. Signals drowned in noise. Needles in the haystack. Whispered sutras. When relevant information is held by hands of those without the social status that garners being paid attention to, I believe we all suffer. How much possibility lies behind locked doors that folks everyday humans are holding the keys to?

Let’s call it “coordination failure” the blocked shot.

Alright that’s fine and dandy but so fucking what?

Ordinarily we’d brainstorm coping strategies for each of these scenarios, what do we do in order to survive in each one of them. This is wise and worthy so let’s do it even if I think its kinda stupid. 

Social Dilemma:

Shut the fuck up and get the fuck out. No joke. This is not a game worth playing and existing in places where this is the vibe only legitimizes it. Or of course, no holds barred win at any cost, and I mean ANY cost, beg, borrow, lie, cheat, steal, or kill for all anyone cares. Be warned, everyone else is also playing as rough as they can as well. Good luck.

Zombie Apocalypse:

Take your pick between build your own mountain fortress, desert oasis or nuclear bunker. At some point hords of unwashed will evolve to fascism and decide anyone who doesn’t think like them is the enemy. The other option is to assimilate completely.

Hero Savior:

Either become the hero of more than normal stature who’s destiny is directly linked to that of their people, or find them. Just like they do with the Dali Lama and shit. 

Coordination Failure:

Understand your puzzle piece and find the others

Now perhaps I am feeling a bit too cynical to cope with bullshit at this moment. Perhaps we’ll revisit, or perhaps we’ll skip to changing the game. First however let’s slow down.

Last week I hosted a workshop so courageous, daring and impactful that it was downright foolish to take such a risk on exactly what I believed the context needed.

I was with a bunch of Agilists, trainers of Scrum Masters, Product Owners and other Agile Coaches. The vibe in the team of trainers was…

Careless:

At some point during lunch at a table of 12 people, someone1 asked if anyone would pass a box of hagelslag(chocolate sprinkles). Another person2 literally threw it across the entire length of the table, landing in the butter.

Aggressive:

Meetings include talking over one another. There’s a lot of “boys club” snarkiness, verbal sparring and sarcastic jokes. The first time I was there, yelling broke out over some unsolicited advice resulting in someone storming out of the office

Retaliatory:

At that lunch from earlier someone1 threw something back at person2*

*disclaimer person2 intentionally opened the door for it by asking someone1 to toss something to them. So there was some playfulness in the vibe.

Now I’m new to this context, so perhaps this is just the culture of the place. However I may be spending some time there and this behavior was alarming to me. So when the monthly retrospective came up, I volunteered to host it.

The tradition is to refer to this large copy of the team canvas for themes of the retrospective. As I thought about what the needs of the context were I noticed that the “Needs and Expectations” section was empty. What’s being avoided here?

The design pattern that I like lately has been following this pattern of self reflection, connecting to others and sharing with the wider context.

Astute observers will recognize 1-2-4-All.

Many thanks to Leen Schelfhout and Dan Aelexi Lewis for helping to crystallize this pattern.

With this as a jumping off point I landed on a simple enough string of:

• Spiral Journal for personal reflection

• Heard Seen Respected(HSR) to connect that reflection to others and

• Discover Action Dialog (DAD) to connect to the context

Spiral Journal is one of those silently-together/alone things.

1. Take a piece of paper,

2. Divide it into 4 quadrants,

3. Draw a spiral for 1 minute,

4. Responding to a prompt in each quadrant, do some silent journaling for 2 minutes each

For the prompts I took inspiration from Heard Seen Respected then I added the prompts from Grief/Transition Walking to get:

2 min: A time when I did not feel heard, seen and respected was…

2 min: That was challenging because…

2 min: What I will always remember and never forget is…

And

2 min: Now that I have reflected on this experience, it may be possible to…

After this I would invite everyone to find a partner and share their story,7 min per person. Reminding folks about active listening and offering 3 questions to guide the inquiry:

• Anything else?

• What was that like for you?

• What happened next?

After both partners share, they then take 5min to talk about what it was like to both tell and listen to one another’s stories.

Then pairs join with another pair, forming a group of four, where they share reflections, looking for patterns, discuss the impact of them and summarize.

Then we come together to harvest as a group where we do the next thing, Discovery Action Dialog (DAD). DAD invites people into larger groups with a scribe to take notes and a host to ensure all of the following 7 questions are answered.

1. How do I know when being heard/seen/respected is absent?

2. What do I do to address this problem?

3. What prevents me from doing these things all the time?

4. Who do I know is not stopped by what stops us and is able to solve well for this? What do they do?

5. Any new ideas?

6. What needs to be done to make it happen? Any volunteers?

7. How do we get started? Who else needs to be involved?

This set of questions helps us to not only explore the solution space, but to fill it in with existing better than normal practices. We call these behaviors “positive deviance” because they break patterns so common we come to see them as rules, but with a positive net result.

I knew this was a high risk maneuver in that context with the reigning vibe. The real question that kicked me over into the fuck-it-YOLO territory was this:

Do I want to conform to this vibe or do something about it?

Introducing a difference to influence the norms will always trigger a response. What can I better live with, the status quo or the response? So I determined to go for it and if they rejected this move, then I wouldn’t be able to thrive in this place even if I could survive it.

Lets Fucking Go.

Retrospectives technically have 5 steps:

1. Set the stage

2. Gather data

3. Generate insight

4. Decide what to do

5. Closing

So to set the stage I pointed to the Needs and Expectations section of the canvas and said:

“Filling in this gap is our target today. I have a workshop consisting of three LS moves that will include some silent journaling, small group conversations and group discussions.”

I launched right in and some people lost their minds during the Spiral Journal. Some didn’t want to draw the spiral, some didn’t want to journal and some didn’t get where this thing was going. It appeared I had overspent my social capital.

I accepted the resistance and found my breath. Other participants asked those talking to be quiet, clarified the goal they had understood from where the session was going and carried on. I continued on to Heard Seen Respected. Many pairs decided to leave the office for the 20min 1-1.

I practiced my patience and did my favorite thing in the world: stood with my hands in my pockets, looking out the window and stared at the sky. Everyone came back in time to gather in groups of 4.

“All” showed me that they had taken the conversations quite seriously but were not willing to share any of the content of their stories with the rest of the group. This tells me a lot about the current state of psychological safety and sense of security in the group.

DAD went well enough until the talking over one another occurred and one participant, like a hero, said “this is exactly what I’m talking about when I can’t get a word in and people interrupt and talk over me, I feel like I’m not seen.”

The elephant had entered the conversation.

The vibe instantly shifted.

Really everything before was a preamble to make that moment possible.

Not just so that a person could say it, but that the rest of the group could hear and accept it as something that mattered.

Flash forward to the end:

Compliments to the chef for not only holding the space but daring to invite the unspeakable.

I asked the scribe to recap their notes, we added them to the canvas. I thanked everyone for the time, attention and energy.

It appears I had survived.

Update: spoke too soon. The following week my contract was terminated.

If I had to do it again, and I almost certainly will, I would have included an accusation audit in the setting of the stage. This move does a great job of expressing empathy, self-awareness and can help people to lower their defenses.

Heard Seen Respected, because it touches very strong emotions, is one of the least appreciated moves in the LS catalog. Nevertheless it is also one of the most powerful in terms of building trust and transforming relationships

Use with care.

In the Liberating Structures community of practice we do this thing we call “stringing.” This is where we take a set of LS and string them together so that the output of one structure becomes the input of another. In the example above this can be seen as the way we go from Spiral Journal as a solo exercise, then take the content of that Journal into Heard Seen Respected to interact about it and ending with Discovery Action Dialog highlight the solution space for the previously defined challenges. Each structure builds on the last in quite a linear way, clear enough.

There is however another thing that is well understood amongst more advanced practitioners that may be harder to make legible for those starting out. Nevertheless this aspect is important because it paints dots on the horizon for what is possible with LS. This has more to do with recombination, customizing and especially nesting elements/parts of one structure inside of another. Let’s go with braiding to meet the metaphor of stringing.

In order to explore it let's highlight a couple of the Attributes of LS.

These are all good to know in order to describe LS but the two that are most related to our scope of understanding braiding are Multi-Scale and Modular. LS work at many scales. There are several different ways to observe this quality. First is that you can use them with groups of many sizes from 1 (they can frame my thinking) to 200 (we can use them to chaordinate). Next is that each structure can be used at for example both micro and macro scales. From this lens we can see a Panarchy-like way that we can use LS at or on different temporal scales or scales of abstraction. In this String I used 1-2-4-All as more of a macro structure to organize the logic of the entire 90 minute conversation. So I can increase the scale of a Micro-Structure, ordinarily used within a larger conversation or meeting, to become the frame of a larger conversation as well.

This resulted in starting the string with Spiral Journal, because it is an exercise that expands the 1 space of silent reflection, helps us change contexts from what we were doing before to what comes after and gather our own thoughts and feelings for what comes next. Then we use Heard Seen Respected for the 2-4 of the conversation and added Discovery Action Dialog for the All.

Now for Modular. There are different types of LS that foreground the 5 Design Elements of:

1. How participation is distributed

2. How groups are formed

3. Set of steps over time

4. Invitations, prompts and questions

5. How space is organized and materials are used

Every LS is a set of instructions for each of these Design Elements resulting in a unique format or pattern for a specific conversation.

Each of those Specific Instructions for each Design Elements is itself a module that can be recombined with others to infinitely remix and create new LS. In the above string I used the first set of steps from an LS in Development, Grief Walking, which itself contains the Pattern of Spiral Journal, and replaced the first of Grief Walking’s prompts with that of Heard Seen Respected. The result is a hybrid structure where the Spiral Journal contains both Heard Seen Respected and Grief Walking in order to make contact with challenging sensations.

Aside from this braiding with Spiral Journal, it's a pretty traditional string with a well established pair of Heard Seen Respected into Discovery Action Dialog. The output of each preceding structure becomes the input of the following. In this way we can provide a more enriched context, filled with feeling for the problem space, before we go filling in the solution space.

Recognizing these attributes of…

• Modularity: seeing that not only is each LS a module but modules of Design Elements

• Multi-Scale: that can be expanded and shrunk at will

And developing these skills of…

• braiding: recombining Design Elements to create new structures

• stringing: sequencing LS together to guide longer conversations around more complex and challenging topics

…in ways that help me to meet the needs of any context is what continues to surprise me most about the power of Liberating Structures.

So What? They stack up and make LS both easy to learn, get started applying and build the skill of facilitation

Now What? LFG

What? LS are practices, not theoretical

So What? That means we’re always applying them to real life contexts and situations

Now What? Here’s what I want to have some grip on in order to pick the right LS…

🅿️ lace: what context, situtation or challenges am I operating in?

🅿️ urpose: what do I want to have happen in this place?

🅿️ people: who do I need to work with to realize that purpose in this place?

🅿️arameters: what logistics must I take into consideration?

What? These are the Min-Specs I need to select a LS

So What? Which of these three is most important right now?

⏹️Interaction: making space for everyone to share information

⏺️Inquiry: the right question

🔼Artifacts: create a deliverable from our conversation to share with others

What? I’m going to unpack the ⏹️Interaction class

So What? Because they are the easiest to apply with very little skill

Now What? Let’s look at what they help us do

What?

While all of these principles are embedded in each LS, ⏹️Interaction emphasizes these

1. Include and unleash everyone

2. Practice deep respect for people and local solutions

3. Build trust as you go

4. Practice self-discovery within a group

5. Amplify freedom and responsibility

So What?

That’s complicated but has to do with this whole notion around increasing the Throughput of human time attention energy information processing capacity, or Bandwidth. A significant part of the value proposition of Liberating Structures is the way that they increase the throughput by intending that everyone participate in many shorter smaller grouped discussions.

Now What?

Well clearly you should learn to weild them.

What? I’m going to unpack the ⏹️Interaction LS I believe are the most useful in the order I believe is best in class

So What? For each I’m going to sketch out a scene with the

🅿️lace

🅿️urpose

🅿️people

🅿️arams

Now what? I’m going to describe how they shape ⏹️Interaction

🅿️lace: peer support exchange

🅿️urpose: give and get advice

🅿️people: that have wide skill distribution

🅿️arams: 30mins, online

Troika Consulting(Helping Heuristics)

Groups of 3 (2 talk while 3rd listens)

Troika: 2 consultants 1 client

HH: coach and client, observer

🅿️lace: work

🅿️urpose: decide how to do the next thing

🅿️people: project team

🅿️arams: 1 hour planning

1-2-4-All

1 min silent reflection

2 min 1-1

4 min pairs pair

5 min group discussion

Viola, everyone’s ideas are on the table

🅿️lace: local community

🅿️urpose: discuss the problem of the day

🅿️people: diverse stakeholders

🅿️arams: strong feelings

Conversation Cafe

Circles of 5 people

Use a talking object to go around the circle 1 min/turn to speak to

1. Topic

2. One another

3. 10min convo

4. Take away

🅿️lace: conference

🅿️urpose: share experience

🅿️people: experts

🅿️arams: big room

UX Fishbowl/Celebrity Interview Prep some questions to get the convo rolling for 20 min Invite audience to form small groups to discuss and generate questions in 5 min Q&A to finish

🅿️lace: New assemblage

🅿️urpose: spread and refine thinking

🅿️people: group of people that don’t meet often

🅿️arams: IRL, 20m, upbeat energy

Impromptu Networking

1-1s

5min

3x

Same question.

Go

Want to experience these moves, practice using them and dig deeper into the Design System?

Drop into a practice session sometime https://lu.ma/wisecrowds

Come hang out with Jyotsna Maan and I in the LS Design Studio starting June 10th! https://tally.so/r/3E56oX

Join Nadia von Holzen, Ewen Le Borgne, and I as we embark on a 6 month Liberating Journey in October https://tally.so/r/mDVp1X

Join us at the @greaterthxn Liberating Structures (Design) Studio on April 29th

Human time attention information energy has enormous creative potential but requires a lot of invested energy as well. At the micro/individual scale a brain accounts for something like 2% of body mass but uses almost 20% of calories. This is a huge evolutionary choice that must carry big upside to justify. That’s on the day to day, but think about how it takes 25 years for a brain to “fully develop.” That’s bananas. We’re reproductively ready at 15ish but brains don’t mature until a decade after that. This all on its own is fascinating but I’m past the point. Booting up brains is crazy expensive.

At the macro organizational scale as well, labor is one of a primary business costs of most any company. Despite that Labor and entrepreneurship show up twice in the factors of production (land labor capital and entrepreneurship).

In relation to the bandwidth, or total potential, there is an actual usage of that we refer to as throughput. The concept here is percentage of total. When we gather together or pool human time attention information energy, how much of that potential are we actually using?

So it rains/accumulates at the rate people/brains gathered together for a duration of time equals our bandwidth or total potential of human time attention information energy processing pool. When you think about the calories and years sunk in rearing and payroll costs and global integrated supply chains to support all of the above the sunk cost of time together is mind boggling. Now compare that bandwidth as potential with the throughput of actual utilization and its enough to make you cry. The literal opportunity costs that we just go flushing down the toilet every day would make our ancestors furious.

And that consideration is before any evaluation about the worthiness of what we’re there paying attention to, the downward vs upward spirals. We’re just talking about what fraction of the possibility we’re burning the entire planet to create are we actually using?

This I’m going to refer to as “the throughput problem” going forward

Now just to be clear I‘m talking about real time, synchronous communication. I’m going to polarize everyone and say I believe that this is the attention that matters most to me. There’s lots to be said about async, but I haven’t given near as much a thought about it. The argument I’m building is about brains and the people they’re in, when they are gathered together at the same time.

When we think about this throughput problem it comes from one primary input that has a few different flavors: one person talks, everyone else listens.

I’m sure why this happens is interesting, but I don’t really care enough to dig into it. I speculate that this is a hominid thing, having something to do with prestige hierarchies. I bet there is a relationship to our individual limitations in language processing and the way that we don’t multi-thread communication. You can either talk, or you can listen, but not both at the same time. You can only consciously process one source of communication at a time as well, so for the sake of keeping everyone on the same page, lets just listen to whoever is talking at any given moment.

This is kind of a weird thing that we do when we gather together, that while it seems pretty normal is actually hard to accomplish. It requires judges to have that wooden gavel thing, raised podiums, architecture like cathedrals or amphitheaters to create passive amplification, electronic amplification with microphones, speakers, screens, lights and production to pull off. Not to mention someone to capture everyone’s attention at once and then to keep and maintain it.

This is going to seem contra to my main point but fuck it. Think about all of the time that people spend together in one time and place, at the train station, in the park, on the bus, in the cafe, at the grocery store, even at work, how often are we all paying attention to one person talking? Hardly ever and yet there is a sort of set of games we play that are hyper insidious where we all share attention as one person talks and everyone else listens, leading to the most tragic throughput imaginable.

There are 5 Stone Age tools for communication and 5 of them fit the pattern of 1 Talks/Everyone Listens. We call them Stone Age tools with a wink and a nudge, but there is a kernel of truth there. We have likely been using these tools since the Stone Age. They are so deeply ingrained that they are somehow omnipresent. Unless you make some conscious effort and exercise an intention, some Process Mindfulness, you’ll default into 1 of them with near absolute certainty.

While I hate them with a passion, let me qualify that for all things there is a season. At times these structures are appropriate, however this an exception, not the omnipresent rule.

First we need to make a distinction between the informal and the formal. Many conversations happen in the informal, you’re at a bbq or event after the church service, what do you see? Likely any number small group conversations, pairs, trios, foursomes, and maybe even larger circles of 6 that soon divide up into smaller groups. Now contrast that to the church service itself, the toast, or the meeting at the office. This thing that happens has one big pattern that expresses itself in 5 ways:

Broadcast mode: one person talks, everyone else listens AKA 1-TO-MANY-COMMUNICATION

Now sometimes this is proper, but rarely, and yet nearly all formal conversations take this format. In five different ways

Presentation

Stand there and lose contact with 50-80% of people, but take solace in the 20% that seem to hang on every word. Those who speak are often at the top of the hierarchy.

Status Update

Like a micro presentation, where everyone takes a turn boring one another with information that is 20%- 30% relevant. We often do this to please an authority figure who finds the information of all parties relevant.

Managed Conversation

Someone asks questions that others answer. This inverts the hierarchy because the one who asks is often in the authority role.

brainstorm

Throwing spaghetti against the wall and argue about which one sticks and what we should do

goat rodeo/unstructured group discussion

The tyranny of structurelessness is real. Those who assert dominance speak up, those who know better stay silent.

The point is that these patterns slow throughput of attention information energy. Which makes it harder to do literally everything.

So here we are to the point where I say it:

A significant part of the value proposition of Liberating Structures is the way that they increase the throughput by intending that everyone participate in many shorter smaller grouped discussions. They accomplish this through the intentional choice around the following 5 design elements

1. How participation is distributed(note the assumption that it just IS)

2. How groups are formed(note the assumption that they just ARE)

3. How steps and time come together(not that they just DO)

4. How people are invited to participate(OG prompt engineers)

5. How materials and space are utilized(embodied cognition)

Every single of the 33+ Liberating Structures includes instructions for each one of these 5 design elements. Whatever choices you make for these are simply design choices. The killer app here is intention then choice, selecting a right companion for the planting, the appropriate waterharvesting infra for the bioregion, the right tool for the job.

Now there are a set of LS that focus on INTERACTION which become the basis for our pattern language for shared thinking. I’ll have to get into each of them to explain how but the long story short is that they offer many ways to increase throughput.

What makes Liberating Structures(LS) liberating?

There is some quantitative reasons that have to do with the consequences that LS cause and a some qualitative ones that have to do with how that experience feels.

Quant has to do with the way that the LS Design Elements help us to get a grip on how:

1. Interaction mechanics that enable everyone to participate in smaller groups in shorter time boxes

2. Inquiry is guided by exploratory questions

3. Artifacts are used to

   1. cohere conversation

   2. collect information

   3. export content of conversations to the wider stakeholder context enabling...

      1. feedback

      2. async participation

These combine to increase the throughput of information, insights and ideas, improving the probability of the relevant information getting to the right place at an appropriate time. We can call this the coefficient of Relational Chaordination

This Relational Chaordination is pretty Liberating from what Joe Freeman calls the Tyranny of Structurelessness https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm

The Qualia has to do with

1. the way that LS are hyper contextual responses

2. the Principles that tend to arise from playing with LS

3. and how hyper contextual responses, the principles and this relational chaordination feel

Confuisiasm is the way we describe the sense that as an individual I can sometimes lose the plot but feel really excited and engaged at the same time. Where though no one seems to be in control and complexity overwhelms, a new portion of our brain is lighting up and I like it

This is the vibe of Liberation: active participation and engagement that influences both the content and guides the process of the larger conversationMaking both of these very accessible for anyone to influence is what makes LS Liberating