Liberating Structures Virtual Immersion

We invite you to join us for an immersive two-day virtual Liberating Structures (LS) workshop led by LS pioneers Anna Jackson and Fisher Qua. Together with participants from around the world, we will create an engaging and experiential virtual learning space. 

During this immersion, you will explore the fundamental principles of Liberating Structures to create truly participative and collaborative processes and gain practical skills to use LS online for facilitating effective virtual sessions. It will also be a valuable opportunity to connect with a global community and learn from each other’s unique challenges and ideas. 

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This training is an 8-hour-long online session split into 2 days. Each day has a timeframe of 5 hours—4 full hours of training and an hour-long break on each of the two days.

Why are we offering a virtual immersion?

Suddenly and unexpectedly, many of us are facing situations, scenarios, complexities, and challenges that are grossly unfamiliar. The dramatic shift we are collectively experiencing demand creative adaptability and a wider range of practical approaches. The migratory certainties and daily variabilities we all face also invite us to respond with humor, humility, care, compassion, rigor, and imagination. 

Within this context, we believe it is vital that we have the skills to: 

• Work with the complexity and the diversity of a group without flattening, mechanizing, or engineering it away
• Fully engage more of each person’s intelligence
• Quickly generate novel options where none “seem to” exist

For us, Liberating Structures provide the practical and tangible basics of “how to make this possible?”

The Virtual Immersion Experience

On this immersive learning workshop, we will experience 7 to 12 original Liberating Structures in a virtual setting, while also experiencing and reflecting about the experience of facilitating Liberating Structures in online settings. 

Our goal is to make sure you can adapt each LS method to tailor it for unique circumstances—whether working virtually with a group, with your family at home, with your community, or with your colleagues at work.

We will give specific attention to sharing examples and stories about how each method has worked for other people in different settings while also encouraging each person to use their imagination to think about where and how the structure may be useful. 

There will be a mix of formal and informal styles—we would like to show that there is no orthodox way to use Liberating Structures. Rather, each person develops a practice with the methods in a way that is coherent with their local or personal contexts.

There will be substantial and generous breaks giving you the opportunity to reflect on and internalize your learnings. 

What will you gain?

The purpose of the Liberating Structures Virtual Immersion is for participants to:

• Understand Liberating Structures so that each person experiences the method and explores the ways they might be useful in a variety of settings and contexts.
• Adapt the use of each method for specific occasions or settings—from offline to online interactions, whether you are working virtually with a group, with your family at home, with your community, or with your colleagues at work. 
• Have a space to connect with and support each other in developing new practices with Liberating Structures.
• Engage with “seriously playful curiosity” as we move from the stabilities of in-person interactions to the newly emerging absurdities of collaborating from behind computer screens.

Why should you attend?

• You need to move your next workshop, meeting, stand-up, design session, support group, community engagement, class, or other interaction online and feel like you might as well do it in a way that draws out more from your friends, colleagues, participants, or family.
• Working online intimidates, scares, or otherwise annoys you and finding something that makes it perhaps more tolerable is intriguing.
• You find the words “Liberating” and “Structures” strange, confusing, intriguing, or otherwise unusual to see together.
• You enjoy connecting with other people over shared challenges and want to support your community in navigating these difficult times with both inventiveness and compassion.
• You believe that simple and clever interventions can make a big difference.

Liberating Structures

Making waves around the world, Liberating Structures (LS) productively and playfully disrupt conventional patterns in how people work together—inviting practitioners to engage, reengage, and dive deeper into this repertoire of 33+ cleverly simple methods that change the way results are generated without expensive investments, complicated trainings, or shifts in formal structures. Prepare to be surprised! 

Some ways to describe Liberating Structures are:

• “Simple social technologies” that try to distribute participation more widely while drawing out greater imagination and variation within groups.
• Familiar facilitation approaches that have been specified and ordered in a particular way.
• Novel patterns for organizing people to collaborate and mutually shape their work together.
• Tiny methods that make it possible to productively engage and benefit from complexity instead of flattening, ignoring, and pushing it away.

More on Liberating Structures here:

Menu of 33+ Liberating Structures

Liberating Structures background & history

Liberating Structures FAQs

Liberating Structures Principles

Note: The workshop will be held in English.