Liberating Structures for Safety, Innovation, and Resilience with Keith McCandless

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Discover the secrets of Red Teaming with Keith McCandless in this insightful podcast episode. Foster collaboration, break down hierarchies, and boost performance with Liberating Structures. Don't miss out on this opportunity to revolutionize your organization's approach to problem-solving and decision-making!

Dive into the depths of complexity science with us, where Keith's expertise guides us through the 'One, Two, Four, All' structure—a technique that magnifies individual thoughts and subsequently molds them into actionable collective insights. As the digital world incessantly demands our attention, we explore indispensable techniques that help maintain deep focus and diminish cognitive drain, acknowledging the unique ways in which introverts and extroverts contribute to the collective intelligence. Hear the poignant story of Seattle’s grief walking—a testament to the healing power of psychological safety and shared experiences.

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Transcript

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 0:57

Hey, welcome to no Way Out. Many of you have been asking how do you execute against the theories that we talk about, the theories that John Boyd talks about? We have these principles of hop, human and organization performance. We have the principles of agile. We have Demingne's 14 points, which John Boyd calls super standards, which all organizations should follow. But the problem with these is we do not understand the how, and today's guest is Keith McCandless. He understands the how quite a bit, with liberating structures. Welcome to the show today, keith. How are you?

Keith McCandless : 1:32

Good Thanks for the invitation. Appreciate it.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 1:35

So I have to be honest with you, keith. Years ago I was living in Seattle. I just moved in from Germany, moved back from Germany and was introduced to liberating structures from an agile coach, if you will one of my mentors, greg Myers, and he sat me down and he went through these things with me and I was like this is weird. This is somebody with a big ego coming out of the military seeing this for the first time. I'm like this doesn't seem right. But I saw the power of it in what people call design thinking and complexity thinking and leveraging the wisdom of crowds, understanding the multiple perspectives, the power of using liberating structures. So I want to thank you for bringing those to our attention over. I think it was in 2014, 2015 when the book was released. But can you give us some background on how? What problem were you trying to solve with liberating structures and what are they? Yeah, Great.

Keith McCandless : 2:39

Well they are. I think the first introduction can be goofy. I'm like what? And in part that's because we've gone very, very, very small at the fundamental way that we relate to each other and that basically, we've inherited approaches that unwittingly over control, exclude people and stifle innovation. And then, till you try, I don't expect anybody to believe that a single one of them helps until they have a chance to try them. There's no reason to believe that they would liberate you from unwitting over control, unwitting exclusion and unwitting stifling like what people can actually bring Until you try them. It just doesn't make that much sense.

Keith McCandless : 3:50

So you mentioned Greg and he tells a story, so I'm going to retell one of his stories about them before I get into what they are. You'll get a sense of what they are. So he had an opportunity. I think he mostly worked in the financial sector as an agile coach, but he had an opportunity to work with high school students in a class and it was about money, like how do you work with money if you're a young person? And so he was using a liberating structure and I'm going to describe what he used and why he used it. So he asked the students.

Keith McCandless : 4:32

There's three parts. The first part was how could you spend money, how could you work with money like a Kardashian? How could you just? How could money fly out in all directions? You know and like, let's for a minute think and make a little list of all the things you can do to use money like a Kardashian. And they did that and they laughed out loud. And they started individually and then talked to a neighbor and this is part of the weird thing. Why would you talk to one other person and then in a group before what are the best? You know, what are the best ways to have money just flow out of your hands, you know, effortlessly. And then the second part of that, after they got all the ideas, and there's wild laughter, because this class, theoretically, is about you know how are you good with money, how do you hold on to money, how do you invest, so forth.

Keith McCandless : 5:32

But the second part is okay. What part of spending money like a Kardashian do you actually do? Like, what are the? So it comes down to earth, like what, what? What parts of those strategies to live like a, spend money like a Kardashian do you do? And again, they think for themselves and one other person group before and they admit to themselves some of the things they do. And then last is okay, any of those things you're doing that creates the opportunity for money to just flow through your fingers and, you know, seemingly disappear. Can you stop any one of them? Just one, pick one, see if you can stop it again, turn to one person. Ask them for a little help on the. Could I possibly stop it? Because stopping any behavior is really hard, everybody knows it and get some help with that.

Keith McCandless : 6:30

And so the idea here that Greg was brilliant at with the students is to get anywhere, to get some progress on spending your money or thinking about money differently. The most important thing is to eliminate, is to stop doing something. Eliminate a behavior that will open up the space for innovation. So that's one liberating structure. Every student in that room had a completely different learning experience and they started to think about their own behavior and maybe started to shift it. So that's what a liberating structure is. It changes a pattern of interaction that's extremely productive. Yeah, so is that helpful, helpful way to start it? It is.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 7:31

So years ago we learned that brainstorming doesn't necessarily work and you need some structure to actually have that chaos or chaotic experience. And now I'm going to pull from the Kinevon framework and we'll talk a little bit about complexity in here. What I understand about chaos is that when you use it, when you put yourself in it, it costs energy but you get innovation out of it, you get novelty out of it. What I see with the use of liberating structures is we it's a shallow dive into chaos using a term from from Dave Snowden where we use chaos to our advantage and we separate connections between people temporarily so that they can think. So think about, like a think right, share. We talk about think first, write it down and then share it out in a liberating structure. So that's a shallow dive into chaos. We're using chaos theory to leverage the wisdom of crowds.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 8:21

Now, brainstorming back in the day, the way many people learned it is let's all get in the room and start talking and you have a hippo problem, the highest paid person's opinion problem, you have anchoring, you have all these biases happening.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 8:32

So what I've seen with liberating structures over the last 10 years of using them and of course we'll talk about UFMCS, the red team in school and how they brought them in is that it actually allows you to leverage the cognitive diversity in a room right, and that's that's the magic shift there is. How do we do this in a timely fashion and get the best quality information, increase the flow of ideas so we generate something that's possibly innovative or in a safety world that's going to prevent us from from failure. So that's the gigantic shift that I've seen in this. However, you have a lot more experience in this and one of the things I want to check in with you on is the connection to complexity theory. Is this where it originated from, or can you take us back in time and how you started thinking about how liberating structures connect to complex adaptive systems and systems?

Keith McCandless : 9:30

So I was a consultant working with all different kinds of clients, and I'd worked with quality improvement, lean systems thinking, idealized design, design thinking. It just went on and on. And I had jobs where I was the director of research or learning, where I was helping other people learn these methodologies. And then I got wind of complexity science first, complex adaptive systems and then people who thought of it as just complex, complex systems that leaned more toward living systems than physical systems. And what happened with that is the implications of the typical sciences break things into smaller and smaller parts, get control. You're going to gain from controlling them and breaking them into smaller parts. You can predict and manage that way. Here it's more like stir it all together with complexity. You can work with the pattern of relationships among the parts. You don't need to break the parts into smaller, but the pattern of the relationships among the parts is what's there. So when I was describing that first example Greg's example with the students, the pattern wasn't jump into brainstorming each person throw their ideas out. It was think for yourself, talk to one other person, get in a group before and do that in a relatively fast cycle. So one minute to think for yourself, two minutes with a pair, four minutes together. What are the best Kardashian ways to have money slip through your fingers? That's a different set of relationships, a different pattern of relationships. It's messy, as you suggest, and yet every individual idea and the sifting and sorting that happens between the one, the two and the four gets you to a place where you really have a deeper understanding and you're constantly thinking of your own pattern and you're seeing this new pattern unfold in which something new, a new idea about, in this case, what we shouldn't be doing or maybe the way you could avoid it, starts to come into play.

Keith McCandless : 12:09

And I think what we did with the liberating structures that was interesting is make that messiness relatively quick and very productive. That is productive, being a novel, new idea for each individual comes into view and the group as a whole enters into a particular kind of awareness. That's action oriented. Right, it's like you can think about your own flow. When you're in a flow and you're creating something new, you're writing or doing something and you're just that's, you have total focus. Well, that can happen in a group. And the liberating structures, that particular three step thing, the action oriented thing, is, and it's all moving toward what can you stop to make space for a better way to handle your money, so that the basic thing that complexity science does is flip us out of control of the parts and invites us to shift the pattern of relationships, get messier but remain focused on drawing out the brilliance of each individual in a way that's action oriented, that results in a next step.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 13:40

Yeah. So the quality of interactions we always talk about that in complexity theory, the quality of relationships that's what matters and that's what we're talking about here is how do we increase that quality of interaction? My experience with one, two, four, all I think it was Greg was the. It was the first liberating structure he shared with us up there on King Street in Seattle and it was a little uncomfortable right to actually go through that because it's something that I'd never seen before and over time, fast forward a few years I wouldn't say I recognize, but I think several of us in the coaching community recognize that extroverts are going to have the ability to do that live one, two, four, all but maybe an introvert might need some time to reflect on it, like overnight. I just want to get your thoughts on that, and where I'm pulling from is I think it's Susan Cain's book Quiet, where she talks about a lot of these things but our is a liberating structure. We throw it onto people live. Is that going to be sufficient for people that need a day to reflect?

Keith McCandless : 14:45

No but it's infinitely better than having not having the one minute for yourself, and most people are pretty, it's pretty easy. I mean, I haven't seen you in 10 years. I can easily no, I'm a little bit extroverted, but I can easily have a conversation with one other person, right. And so it's infinitely better and probably not enough. But these aren't for special events. I mean you can use liberating structures as special events, but it's for every day. Let's say you do a stand-up every day, right? Well, why wouldn't you do that using one, two, four, all, so you're one can be thinking about what happened yesterday that I'm still contemplating. So it's more a different pattern that becomes a habit over time and you become comfortable with it. When you're first, ta-da, let's do this thing, and everyone should be deeply suspicious of the new thing that is introduced. Right, it has to prove itself a little the first time and repeatedly prove itself over time.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 16:28

Right, let's talk about this. Yesterday I delivered a presentation to a large oil and gas company on a little bit about how much we're distracted by technology. You know, 36 times an hour, I think it is. We check our email 352 times a day. We check our phones. We lose 10 IQ points. We're just distracted all the time. Then you or I come into a meeting or an event let's just call it a meeting, because I think everybody's not assuming meeting, not a virtual meeting, but a meeting where everybody has their computers up and they're not listening and they're doing things.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 17:03

What makes liberating structures so hard is you have to put your computer down, you have to put your device down, you have to be present, correct, and that's a big shift. Now, when you walk in and you introduce this type of thing, that's not the way they're used to working. They're used to being distracted, chasing that dopamine rush, if you will. So if you're going to be successful as an organization, you have to slow down a little bit, and that's why I like liberating structures.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 17:32

The downside to liberating structures from my perspective is I'll go back to it. It's an ego thing, right? This is weird. This is weird having somebody tell me I need to not talk to my neighbor, I need to write down something, and then we're going to be silent and we're going to have conversations with one another and one, two, four, all, or another example that I like is using the fishbowl in a retrospective or even listening to a customer right or customers. But even setting that up requires energy energy not from just a facilitator, but energy from the participants, because it's new. Tell me where I'm wrong or what you can add to those statements there, keith.

Keith McCandless : 18:19

Well, the thing that the book and the practice, the thing that you gain over time as you use them, is the selection of the challenge that you're what's the purposeful, important. Yet you need everybody to figure it out and how you articulate that, the purposeful challenge that you're going to address, and you do it. Not only we're going to address this, but you're going to make a statement about what's possible. So each liberating structure has quite a bit about what's possible when you use it. So let's take the user experience fishbowl or maybe wisecrows would be better.

Keith McCandless : 19:25

And so we're going to do this activity and the reason we're going to use it. So this is how I would start anything. The reason we're going to use it is because we want to make explicit what users are experiencing in the field so that we can bring it into our delivery. And that's not the best one. Let's see what another one would be. Well, that first one. I described the Kardashian thing.

Keith McCandless : 19:56

It's like we're going to do this activity and the reason we're doing it is so that we can stop behaviors and make space for innovation in how you work with money. So, do you want to do that? If you don't want to do that, that's what we're going to do. So you, if you're leading and when you're getting started with this, you are probably the individual person who's going to need to think that through and say the words. After that, other people can do it, but you have to pick a topic and you need to say we're going to address it in a way that makes it possible for us to stop some things so that we make space for innovation, or that we're doing this fishbowl so that we bring experience from the field directly into what we'll do next.

Keith McCandless : 20:56

And then I usually don't say, put down your devices or turn them off? I could, but it wouldn't be useful. For the first experience you pretty quickly it's going to be different, but the main thing that's going to make a difference and get people to at least listen is they'll be invited to do something immediately like write your questions. As you're listening to people talk, write your questions in chat. Let's say it's virtual or you need to give everybody something to do almost immediately.

Keith McCandless : 21:41

And those two things the purposeful challenge and give somebody an active role immediately creates the opportunity for you to break through all of the noise. Now, I don't know if that helps you, but that's usually.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 21:59

No, it's very helpful.

Keith McCandless : 22:00

Yeah, and there's usually somebody like, if Greg is in the room, if Greg was with you and some other people and other people hadn't done the thing, I'd ask Greg for a brief like what did you use it for? How did you get? What did those high school students do after you did this thing that we're about to do?

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 22:19

Yeah, and I would tell you I have seen people push back on this immediately and then, minutes later, see the value in it. So if you take them on the journey, they get the value and then they go we're sold on this. That's how you hook them on doing, continuing to do it on their own.

Keith McCandless : 22:40

One thing early on, before there was a book or anything, somebody came up to me and said thanks for the respect. Immediately I could see that you actually wanted me to participate, you wanted to hear, I had a way to contribute immediately and you respected it. We can't solve this problem or we can't make progress on this challenge without you, and that's why I'm asking you to think for a minute, even to say think for a minute on your own, before we get into this, because it's hard. We're going to have to find our way through. And it's respect and people can feel. If you feel it and you believe it, then they'll feel it too.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 23:34

We talk about weak signal detection and some of the examples we use are inattentional blindness. We only see what we expect to see. So we'll take people through those experiences where they can see kids dribbling a basketball on the gorilla walk across the stage, or there's many examples that we can use. We can use Mooney pictures, we can use Adelson's checkerboard. We can use all these things. What that shows individuals and groups is that people, a minority number of people in your group see things that the majority do not see.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 24:05

And what liberating structures allows us to do is to go after those weak signals that roughly rough numbers 17% to 20% of people see things that others don't see, and it's not the same people, it's just you and I are going to notice different things. But we use that to leverage the neuroscience, the physics and, I guess, the complexity science behind all this and say, okay, this is a truth. Liberating structures, a basic thing like think, write, share and into a oh, let's see, five will get you 25 is a good thing. It's going to leverage the diversity of the group and if it's 20 people or 50 people or 500 people, we could do it to some extent. But that's the value of this is we're going to find those weak signals. I can't remember if you ever talked about weak signal detection with liberating structures or not, have you?

Keith McCandless : 24:58

Well, we avoided almost all theory in the book, so they're built in because most people don't care and I always love talking about it because that's what inspired me but it doesn't work for a variety of reasons for lots of others, so I don't do much of it but let's take, for example, critical uncertainties.

Keith McCandless : 25:23

It's all about weak signals. So what are the two biggest critical and uncertain things about your business, your activity, whatever it may be? And so let's say you're an international NGO and they identify off the top Well, we don't know how many people are going to be dislocated, whether it's everywhere in the world. They'll be dislocated. It'll just be kind of local in spots, and we don't know whether our organization will have capital or very little or a lot. So one way to get at weak signals would be, say, divide a group into smaller groups and say one of the there's four futures here. And we want you to make it believable that we're going to get into a place where there's dislocation worldwide. I mean, people really need your help. You're an international NGO and you don't really have many resources. Well, what are you going to do? What are you going to do Is the final point. But before that, what would the world create? A world in which there's some breaking news, there's some conditions in the economy, there's things, create a world in which it's believable that there's dislocation everywhere and we don't have really much money. And through that, through creating this world which it's believable, you get all these weak signals by imagining. So I would say there's a lot more differentiation, a lot more different kinds of ideas in people. When they use their full imagination more than 17% so they're imagining this world they kind of can believe that, yeah, that's a future that could happen.

Keith McCandless : 27:20

It's an extreme version of what's critical and uncertain about our future as an international NGO. So now, with those signals, imagine what your strategy is. What are you going to do to be successful? As maybe you're into food security, this particular NGO is just about food. You haven't enough food to eat. What are you going to do if there's that much dislocation and you can't pay for the food yourself? Like, what are your strategies? So, all of a sudden, it's not just the weak signals that you could get about dislocation, or the weak signals that your flow of money through philanthropies or governments is going to decrease. It's also the hint, hint is like a weak signal or a hunch about strategies moving forward.

Keith McCandless : 28:21

So that's a liberating structure. It's called critical uncertainties and it taps both the once you've imagined that world and you have three other groups imagining different futures, which are also extreme. You have a whole set of weak signals to pay attention to and out of all of those, you develop some strategies that are just robust. We should do all whatever future holds. That's a strategy. And then some hedging strategies, which are just in case we get that really dark future and we started to see signals of that. Here's what we would do and we need to invest in that hedge. There's other kinds of strategy, like antifragile, but basically that's the way. Built into a particular liberating structures are the weak signaling skillfulness on weak signals. Is that helpful example?

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 29:28

It's very helpful. In fact, you brought up hedging, you brought up optionality. This kind of leads into red teaming as well, which we might get into the idea that, going back to the human sensor network, when we talk about that we usually are looking at how do we identify risks or what are the leading indicators to risks in a complex environment where we just don't, we can't plan ahead, we can't identify beforehand. So it's taking the liberating structures that we may teach in a workshop and applying them throughout the life cycle of an organization or product or whatever, and in the safety critical world we'll use them to help identify weak signals and leading indicators to emerging risks. So I'm not sure how your relationship with the safety community has been since you started this, but have you worked with the safety community, or resilience or anything like that?

Keith McCandless : 30:31

We cut our teeth on superbug infection control in hospitals and I don't know if that's it's safety oriented work and we kind of moved out of infection control into related things in healthcare, which are falls and medication errors, and did some work on simple rules or minimum specifications for how to address safety challenges. So, for example, I don't know, is that safety? Are we still talking about?

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 31:04

Yeah, of course it is you know that to me, healthcare in surgical teams. Actually up in Seattle we've had Dr Lo on the show who uses a lot of lessons from aviation crew resource management, which leverages a lot of these ideas as well. So we do know that there's a, you know, the team's science is borrowing from your work and liberating structures. We call it red teaming to enable teams to identify threats, weak signals and things like that. So, yes, healthcare is a huge industry that's taking this on.

Keith McCandless : 31:36

Well, my first, just a little story. My first hint about this was a children's hospital and they had policies and they're trying to get the weak signals and all of that, but the thing they really did that was brilliant were simple rules. So, yeah, there's procedure and we're trying to. You know we fail safe, everything and all of that. But what made the biggest difference was that each individual this is a more distributed way to change the pattern of relationships. So, a distributed way, so any person as they're completing their task, if they see something that puts a patient at risk, they have three things to do and they have complete right to do it.

Keith McCandless : 32:23

And the first one is stop the line. Yep, they see, it looks like this vial is mislabeled. Whoa, stop, they have the right to do it, and that you know. They may not be the manager, they may not be in charge of anything, but they noticed it. So that's their, the simple rule number one. Second one is fix it right there, if you can, and record the fact that there was this problem. If you can fix it right there, do that and record it. And the third one for anything that isn't fixable, you need to find somebody to address that and also record. And so that set of three simple rules are one level up from all the policies, all the things that anybody. It's a very distributed way to solve safety problems.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 33:24

Right right.

Keith McCandless : 33:25

And in healthcare it kind of had the idea had come out of manufacturing, I think, first to stop the line. But in a safety context of a really complex healthcare setting it's different. So, and yeah, this, the idea of rules of thumb or help, heuristics for in the middle of things that are fully distributed to each individual, I think those are underappreciated in lots of settings.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 34:04

Yeah, heuristics are great. We, you know, in aviation we had aviate, navigate, communicate, so get away from the ground, find where you're going and then tell somebody what's going on, Right? So those things keep kept us alive quite a bit. So heuristics and rules of thumbs are great. Hey, I want to switch gears a little bit here and talk about we're covering a lot of territory and I like that.

Keith McCandless : 34:25

I like that. I hope it works for you.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 34:27

Yeah, no, I love it. I love it. Psychological safety and liberating structures. I want to get your thoughts on that right now. Are they the same difference, just based on your experience and what you know?

Keith McCandless : 34:41

Well, the pandemic really brought out so much more about psychological safety, and so in the last five years, new liberating, so we wrote about 33 in the book. There's a whole bunch of new ones created by users all over the world and they're great and many of them have a help a person come into the work in a way that helps them to be feel safer about their participation. So I'll give you an example, a pretty extreme example, of one I've been working on and I'm very excited about it, but it's called grief walking. I don't know if you've run into it, but it's a purpose. The thing that it makes possible is to tap into social support after a loss, any loss.

Keith McCandless : 35:48

And the first time that it was trialed in a Seattle user group with Greg Meyers in the room I think he was there we had maybe 30 people and one of the participants had been losing his sight slowly. And the way grief walking starts as everybody in the room finishes four sentences and it's and I'm still talking about psychological safety here about a loss. So the first one is yes, it is true that you know some loss. They fill it in. It is hard because I'll always remember and never forget. Fill in the sentence. And last is now that I've had a chance to write about or talk about my grief, my loss. It may be possible too, so everybody has written that down.

Keith McCandless : 36:54

And then this is the safety part, the psychological safety. Would anyone like to walk? Walk their loss, walk their grief. And what that means is you take what you've written and you'll walk around the room to four different groups. We'll divide the group into four and you'll walk around the room and read to the first group of people. The first response yes, it is true that.

Keith McCandless : 37:27

And this particular person in the user group in our group said yes, it is true that I'm just about blind Right, and I was walking him. There's a guide for this. I'm walking with him and I don't know what he's written. I have no idea, but he's decided to. I'm going to walk it. And then anybody in that group can, if they're moved by what he said, they're invited to walk with us to the next station and they have the option of putting hand on his shoulder or not, and he can say yes. And he said yes. And so now he's got me and one other person walking to the next group and he reads out his second thing, which is it's hard because sight is so dear to me. It guides me in everything I do. And he walked through the whole circle and of course he had seven or eight people with hands on his shoulders as he's walking around.

Keith McCandless : 38:38

And then there's an opportunity to hear I ask you know well, why did you walk? Why did you choose to walk with this person? And they say, well, I've also had a loss. Or, and you hear from all the people that walked with him. Then you hear from the person who decided to tap social support in regard to their loss and say, and this particular person said, I've never felt more supported, more.

Keith McCandless : 39:16

I don't think the word comforted was used, but what we were trying to design there and it's been used now all over in lots of different settings in which people have had really big losses.

Keith McCandless : 39:30

It could be at work you know, this team left, or I lost my position, or I'm dying, or any number of like unbelievably hard things. It actually does the thing. It taps social support for a pretty profound set of losses and the reason we were even trying this was the recognition that there's been so much loss and typically what we do is separate that person and this goes right back to the complexity science. Let's take their loss in that person and give that, get them a counselor, rather than distribute, you know, have a distributed way to tap the social support that's there and can this group? Can the pattern of people, can the pattern of including people in someone's loss, provide something of great value? So it's the most extreme value of providing psychological safety for the hardest moment in somebody's life, or could be the hardest moment when they've experienced a loss. So did that get after your question?

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 40:48

Let's, let's build on this more so as you're walking through grief walking, it kind of reminds me of things that are possible inside a an effective retrospective or debrief, where a leader could, could bring up a shared experience, and this is true that I failed to put my mask on during the pre op right now, and use an example from a surgical team Because we got to admit some type of fallibility, some type of failure in front of guests or in front of your peers, I think what you just shared with me the language makes it easier to share than saying something like I failed you at this, right Okay those, those things are something here we can improv on it.

Keith McCandless : 41:31

The prompts are and you don't have to share what you write. The other thing, the safe part, is you just respond to the prompts, and they're going to provoke you, though they will. If you respond to them, they'll bring things up. So you have to, as things come up, like we have other safety, like, if you need, we have always one person in the room that's there. If you need to walk off with someone else and just talk to them and cry or do whatever you're going to do, there's somebody here who's there for you.

Keith McCandless : 42:03

But those prompts are not just for separate things. They're progressive, right, right, they all lead into each other, and so there's different ones that could work for different settings, like a retrospective. There's lots of good ones, for we do what. So what? Now? What? Which is what happened? What are the facts? What are the evidence? Well, so what, given that evidence? What of that evidence is important, or do you have hypothesis based on that? What do you make out of that evidence? Is the? So what? And then the now what is? What's the next step that follows from the what, the evidence, what you made of it and what you're going to do. So that's your typical retrospective. For us is to break those into three progressive elements.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 42:56

I have a huge question for you, and this is a there's a reason I'm asking this. You started with what what happened, right? Can you explain to us why that's so important to start with them, not necessarily start the debrief with what happened, but have it included, included in there what happened? Can you explain why you chose those words?

Keith McCandless : 43:16

If you don't here, I'll go to the.

Keith McCandless : 43:18

if you don't do it, what you'll get is people sharing what they want to do next, and that ends in me immediately goes to what we call a goat rodeo, which is two people fighting over what they think should happen and they have not shared what evidence led to it and they haven't compared the different views of the evidence that are in the different people in the room. So until you've shared the evidence and sorted and sifted it, jumping Well, I think of the ladder of inference, which is maybe you know it, but it's all. It defines how we think and we think so quickly. We don't notice, this is how we think, but we we're always gathering evidence, you know it's, and we very quickly assign meaning to undifferentiated reality.

Keith McCandless : 44:15

I'm looking around like this because I'm noticing different things and I'm, without having to think, I'm assigning meaning to each, to some of the elements. I pick out some and then I say, well, that means, well, it's going to be nice later today. I don't want to work, or I, maybe it's possible, I don't have, I can reschedule something, and that's the. So what? But if there's more people in the room, each is assigning, looking at evidence and assigning some different kind of meaning to it, which is one couple rungs up the ladder and then finally, but in a split second in our heads, we go to the what action is required, right, we don't really have to pay attention to the evidence gathering or the conclusion making or hypothesis making. We just go right to the top and the second you do that, you get into a stupid misunderstand.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 45:13

Yeah, so miss remembering the past will not improve the future. We hear that from like Any any Duke writes it all the time. So I want to. This is this is critical because we've been having these conversations in the safety industry that you need to understand what happened. That's why we're using liberating structures to Understand from multiple perspectives what happened, because way we experience reality is constructed top down, inside out. We talk about that on the show we use John Boyd do to. So everything you just went through is absolutely critical in and, like again, you have more experience than I do it in this space.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 45:51

The ladder of inference is key in this. We don't like to go into what went well, because the attitudes and beliefs start emerging of what we should do in the future without knowing what happened in the past, and this is critical. So I'm going to combine a few things here. We talked about ends, these Situational awareness level one, level two, level three and, to simplify it, what happened, what's happening and what could happen in the future. Right, you can't determine what could happen in the future unless you know what's happening now. So be in present, and the only way you can be present if you understand what happened in the past and we talk about this when we In fighter aviation, in order for us to accelerate human performance in the cockpit, we have to look back at what happens so you can pay attention to what's happening now the next time you go. Do it so you can prove your thought process and what's going to happen in the future right, and that's how we accelerate performance in the aircraft. So I want to thank you for that that. I've been trying to find a way to explain exactly what you just gave us for the last year and a half, because people have been asking me and that's a huge, huge help there. Keith, thank you so much for that.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 47:00

But on the on the Liberating structures in planning, execution and assessment, or debrief, retrospective, the team lifecycle we use these everywhere. I mean once we show people how to use them and we invite them to use them. Don't get me wrong, we don't force it upon them. It's up to them to actually want to use them and see that, see the value out of it, right. So we can't force this on anybody, but we know it works when the teams pick up on it and execute. I'm going to ask you a question how do you get executives? Because are now, which leads to executives in a large organization. And the reason I bring this up is I had Chris Clearfield on who wrote meltdown. I think he worked with Chris a couple of times in Seattle. He lives out there but he's using liberating structures quite a bit and I asked him the same question and that is how do you get executives People that know everything you know or how big he goes to actually use liberating structures?

Keith McCandless : 48:07

You pick a moment and it can be a brief moment where there's a Undeniable confusion and there's a few number, there's a few people that are interested in the ideas and the theory and more distributed systems, but that's rare. So usually I'm Invited in when there's something that's happened that's confusing and there have been repeated attempts and repeated failures to address it, and then the whole repertoire of liberating structures makes sense. And I'm trying to think of a time when there's usually an event, there's one thing that's out of control or it's confusing. If we can make progress on that, then there's the question what else could we use this for Lots of times, whenever the client and I'm a consultant and usually somebody is asking for help on this difficult thing and I'll say well, we're going to make progress on that. Clearly, the way we do it will change forever how you address all future challenges. That's an incredibly bold statement and I'm 100% confident in saying it. And, partly, if we don't make progress on that thing that they came forward with, it won't go anywhere. It's not going to be something they bring into their daily work. It's not going to be a new pattern that changes the culture of the organization.

Keith McCandless : 50:19

So a recent really big Fortune 50 company was working on virtual. What are we going to do about bringing people back to work? Was kind of and so we can't figure it out. But the top leadership was kind of like no, we like face to face. So after a little bit of trying to address how could we make virtual online work better, it was clear that that really didn't matter to them. We're going to get back to work. I mean, we'll make some adjustments for the highly valuable people that are technical, that we'll give them more privileges to work from wherever they want. But we're not going to no, we're really not going to take any action on the thing that they invited liberating structures to help them with. So pretty quickly I could see that this was not purposeful, not something that was going to make a difference, and liberating structures weren't going to become something the executives do because they didn't really care about the challenge. So that sounds I think there has to be something, and so we've been pretty successful.

Keith McCandless : 51:38

When an entire business has come to a plateau, Like our business model has stalled out, we don't really know what to do or how to move forward next, and I'm more interested in that situation than I am in a project oriented thing, like doing a design sprint with liberating structures, that's great. Maybe that influences something else, but it often sort of just stays at that project level. So I'm not answering your question very directly because it's very contextual. Yeah, and there's a certain set of conditions that make it hard. It's so pervasive because we're at least when I started and we could have started the interview with this but the five dominant patterns, we fall back to them all the time.

Keith McCandless : 52:35

Even if you find liberating structures great, we're going to fall back to a presentation. One person is shaping what happens next. Right, it's not a distributed thing. We do report outs which are there's an expectation for what the boss wants to hear or what the leader wants to hear, and you're going to pretty much deliver on that expectation. You're not going to bring anything new or interesting in.

Keith McCandless : 53:02

You might go so far as to do a brainstorm, but that's going to be really separate from people close to the challenge usually, and it's going to be very conceptual, no link to whatever it is, and then when you throw up your hands and you've got nothing else, you'll do an open discussion which ends up in that problem where stupid misunderstandings happen and we call it a goat rodeo because it's amusing, but basically two or three people get into a fight over something fairly ridiculous, which is their opinion, and so if that's all we have, those are pretty much the dominant patterns that we have and we fall back to them.

Keith McCandless : 53:55

And the leaders in particular got there not through distributing control, they got there through and you can really go amazing places without distributing control. You can have a big thing. It's just not adaptable. When there's a disruption you are in a bad way and that's why I was really looking forward to you, because every time I've worked with anybody in the military or it has a field operation that's as changeable as what happens in lots of military situations. They get the relationship between the field, A more distributed approach to planning and decision making and sense making and all of those things is really they from the top.

Keith McCandless : 54:51

They get that, which isn't necessarily true in lots of settings. So I feel like I'm complaining about it now Go ahead.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 55:03

Maybe there's an illusion of the fact that we get it in the military. I think that's having been at the senior level of the military I'd say it is an illusion At the operational level.

Keith McCandless : 55:16

Don't ruin my dreamy transference over to you.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 55:23

And speaking of the military, this is critical. We've had Colonel Steven Rotkoff on the show who stood up the UFMCS University of Foreign Military and Cultural Studies, the Red Teaming School, so they used maybe about seven or eight different liberating structures in that guide. I think my 15% we just took a look, yeah, it's one, two, four, all five gets you 25 fishbowl and more Well referenced material that references your work. And when we talk about red teaming, we're actually being inclusive of liberating structures. Because for us, when we do a red teaming which is, how do we leverage cognitive diversity within a system? We want and mitigate cognitive biases? We want to give teams and organizations a structure to do that Right. And there's no one size fits all approach and there's context is going to drive a lot of what we do. We'll add things like Dave Snowden's ritual descent. That looks a lot like the ad agency. I think it's called Troika.

Keith McCandless : 56:34

Troika, triz or Troika yeah, yeah.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 56:40

So these things you can kind of mix and match them. But my point behind us is the military saw the need to leverage the diversity of the group. So we stood up, ufmcs, and they borrowed and referenced your work. I know you're familiar with that, right.

Keith McCandless : 57:01

A little. The work has spread so far and so wide. I cannot keep up, so I'd like to know more and I'm because I'm writing a new book I'm trying to make the intersections more explicit and I want to continue a little with you about like what are more specifically. You're using different language, but it's the same thing, so the intersection is important to me, and most of the new liberating structures have come out of the intersections and the different domains in which the work has been used, and we don't have a closed system. It's wide open. So what you're telling me about red teaming, I love every word. I love the way you're describing it. I can't get enough of it, and I'm sure that in there are things that I never imagined, but we aren't going to get to right now.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 58:05

Right. So we mix and match everything. So we'll do like a worldly map to understand the external environments. I will use red teaming techniques to do that. In a virtual environment, we'll do the same thing because things like the Miro board gives us ability to think right, share and move things around and you can actually do dot voting and you can actually set up five, get you 25, and all that Same thing with the Microsoft teams.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 58:26

I remember when we went virtual a few years ago, I was completely against doing anything online and then we had to do it. So we had to come up with ways of how do you actually set up a, how do you provide input to a group, or how does an individual provide information to a group where others can't see it right? And there are ways to do that on Microsoft teams and zoom and things like that. So liberating structures, in my view, survived the transition to virtual environment and they can survive the hybrid environment as well. I mean it's I don't care if I have 25 people in the room and 50 people online. I can still do the same thing. It's pretty powerful for the most part. So a lot of positive things to say about your work there from what we do, and I just want to give you an opportunity to ask questions on anything that we covered today or anything that may interest you.

Keith McCandless : 59:23

Yeah, uh, well, one thing I'm writing extensively with a partner about online Uh, so I don't think we could get to it here completely, but how you've adapted things online. A lot of some of the bridges between the domains which were easier well, at least easier for me, because I was flying all over the world and there were user groups connected, liberating structures, user groups connected from all over the world, and some of that with a pandemic, some of the bridges cracked a bit or disappeared. I'd love to take some time with you and look at some of the online adaptations that you've made. Uh, and it's very selfish because I'm writing, writing about it now and we're doing some. We've done some exciting things, but I'm sure that there are places where your online work uh will add uh to my understanding of what's possible.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 1:00:35

Yeah, so I'll give you an example. Uh, and this came from the red team in school Think, write. Share is to me, is foundational to um all the structures out there. Think about it, write it down and then we'll communicate it out in a way In the virtual environment.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 1:00:50

We turned that into think chat, send, right, so put it in chat and not the chat that right, but not the chat where everybody can see it, send it to a facilitator, one person who can uh, collate all the information and see it right. So that is just like we do in in, uh, in a face to face and in situation when we think about something to write it down. I can't see what everybody wrote down until I I we run through the liberating structure. So we want to create that same environment. So think, write, share became think chat, send Um. And we taught scrum masters and agile coaches how to do that and work quite well. And then we picked up Miro and mural and all the white boards out there to help us with it. Um, it was a great transition. It really was.

Keith McCandless : 1:01:36

That's cool. I laughed out loud cause I just love the sound of it and I can see it in print already. Um, uh, one thing we've done and, uh, I don't know if it's appropriate for the, the show, but uh, like those prompts for grief walking. Uh, yes, it is true that it's hard because, uh, they also could be, uh, related to your strategy. So in chat you can write, uh to make progress.

Keith McCandless : 1:02:07

What we must resist is and people could be a hundred or 200 or any number what we must resist is to make progress. You know, and then you see they, just everybody sees each other's it's in chat. And the second one would be um, uh, what we must, what needs to make progress, what we need to invent or create from new is, and you get a bunch of things and then to make space for the new things, what we must stop doing is, and just, whatever the prompts are, you have it all in chat. You can grab that entire chat, put it in Miro, make post-it notes out of everything and if it's too many people for you to do it yourself, in about 20 seconds you can have your AI assist can create. What are the three salient themes for what we must resist, what we must stop and what we wanna invent, what we imagine can invent, and so that's a lot like think share, send share, think no, what was it again?

Keith McCandless : 1:03:25

Think, think, chat send, right, chat send, that's a lot like it, except the send is visual, so you have visual control over the themes, over and each idea is both a post-it note, but you could also ask or you could do it yourself. Participants clump, affinitize into similar, and let's name those clumps of similar things to resist similar things to. So what I love about the online and what I wanna learn from other people is how do you do that? How do you include people in thinking more deeply, articulating in a way that can be made visual and organized into themes that imply that you're gonna do something, because unless you make that connection, I mean it doesn't have to be immediately.

Keith McCandless : 1:04:30

There's lots of things that spark the slow imagination of a person that isn't gonna immediately. But what's the first, next step out of these themes that just got generated on this whiteboard that we can return to until that? I like the idea of each meeting is a lift off from where you left off the last time. So suddenly you have this digital record of your thinking and some sort of way, some sort of con bonnie kind of way to address what's revealed. So, anyway, I'm blathering, but that's the kind of.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 1:05:15

Thing.

Keith McCandless : 1:05:16

This is great. The detail. I wanna know how did you do that, Because that's what's going on, yeah go ahead.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 1:05:27

I've got it. So everything you just talked about, we've got a couple of things AI and the use of liberating structures. I haven't thought about that, but you're right, that's spot on. One of the problems we're trying to solve is how do we move away from checklists into complex environments where we have to provide some scaffolding for leaders to think about a problem, a strategic problem, and I think the prompts you kind of walked through, married up with something we call like dim fill diplomatic information, military, economic, financial, infrastructure, legal allow us to marry these two worlds and think strategically. So I'm gonna play our noodle around with that over the next couple of weeks to see what we get out of it. But this is why these conversations are so important. It's not hate to tell everybody why do we have these conversations? It's so we can learn. That's the big secret here.

Keith McCandless : 1:06:18

Is there anyone else here? I don't see anyone else here.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 1:06:22

Well, I mean, this is why we do it. Most people think it's for whatever. There's so much learning happening here. I just wanna thank you for the opportunity. Yeah, Gacky, this has been awesome. We'll definitely do this again. But do you have anything you wanna share with our guests about what you're doing? Next, you brought up a new book, some new ideas on the liberating structures. Anything else you wanna share?

Keith McCandless : 1:06:49

Well, there's user groups spread out around. If you, I could send you some links to user groups that are online for the most part, but the face-to-face ones are starting up again. You're in. You are in Wichita now you're in. I'm in Virginia Beach, so okay.

Keith McCandless : 1:07:07

I don't think there's anything right there, but that's one way I like to give people a chance to learn more For the book. We kind of have an open. Once a month we're gonna be prototyping some online thing that we've created, either a revision of a existing liberating structure or an entirely new one that's well-suited to online. So once a month, once a month, there'll be an hour or 90-minute session where we're prototyping and anybody is invited it wants to and I'll send you a link about that. Okay, and that will be a little messy, but we're not gonna prototype anything we don't think is awesome already, or half awesome could be made more awesome. And then, yeah, we have a Slack group. There's all sorts of little things I'll send you some details about if people want to know more you can attach to whatever, but those are the main things I think, yeah.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 1:08:17

Perfect, just to lighten the talk with you?

Keith McCandless : 1:08:20

Yeah, it's like, okay, we're syncing up, syncing up.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 1:08:25

Yeah, no, this is. We have these conversations with other coaches all the time about anything, folks that came up with Dave Snowden or Nigel Thurlow or John Turner. We have folks that come on the show that have deep knowledge and you know flow systems from a physical standpoint or the neuroscience behind things. So what we're trying to do here is just kind of show everybody that you need to have a beginner's mindset to really understand how to adapt in this world. And again, liberating structures. Without that beginner's mindset I would never have picked them up, you know I would have ran away from them. So you know you're not always going to be an expert in everything, so it's okay to bring in something that seems a little weird, but I guarantee you liberating structures are life changing for organizations. Yeah, great, matt. Appreciate your time. Keith, I'm going to keep you on for a moment, but thank you very much.

Keith McCandless : 1:09:21

Yeah, my pleasure. Thank you so much.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 1:09:24

Thank you.