The New Liberating Structures Menu

00:00:02: Johannes Schartau: Welcome to Episode 14 of transform together, the Holisticon podcast meetup. I’m Johannes Schartau, and today I’m talking to Keith McCandless.

00:00:11: Johannes Schartau: Keith McCandless is the co-developer of Liberating Structures, a practical repertoire of methods designed to include everyone, unlock creativity, and make collaboration more productive in groups of any size.

00:00:22: Johannes Schartau: He works at the intersection of organization development, complexity science, and social innovation, helping people and organizations tackle complex challenges, discover opportunities, and build momentum for change.

00:00:35: Johannes Schartau: Together with Henri Lipmanowicz, he helped develop Liberating Structures over many years of fieldwork and co-authored The Surprising Power of Liberating Structures, which has become a widely used resource for facilitators, leaders, and change practitioners.

00:00:49: Johannes Schartau: Keith is in the process of publishing The Liberating Structures Fieldbook together with Nancy White, which includes ten new Liberating Structures. Keith, welcome to the podcast.

00:01:03: Keith McCandless: Johannes, delighted to be here with you all.

00:01:09: Johannes Schartau: Alright, let’s get into this. The Liberating Structures menu is about to undergo the most significant change since you released The Surprising Power of Liberating Structures. What exactly is going to change?

00:01:22: Johannes Schartau: You’re wiggling your finger.

00:01:25: Keith McCandless: I love her.

00:01:26: Keith McCandless: I’m doing a swirling motion. Lots of things have changed and are changing.

00:01:33: Keith McCandless: Although…

00:01:36: Keith McCandless: You can trust everything that we did with the first book and the repertoire. It’s all still there, but we’re transcending quite a few different elements.

00:01:49: Keith McCandless: Probably the most important thing to know is that we…

00:01:53: Keith McCandless: are incorporating what we learned in the field

00:01:57: Keith McCandless: from practitioners

00:01:59: Keith McCandless: into the new book. So probably the…

00:02:05: Keith McCandless: A lot of people are interested in what the new Liberating Structures are, but really what we’re doing is bringing the wisdom of

00:02:12: Keith McCandless: what people in the field have done with the work.

00:02:16: Keith McCandless: And particularly when Nancy and I started, we thought, oh…

00:02:20: Keith McCandless: as COVID started, it was just a few weeks before most of the structures had been translated into online

00:02:28: Keith McCandless: form.

00:02:30: Keith McCandless: And it took our breath away. It was like, “Oh, really?”

00:02:34: Keith McCandless: You can do that.

00:02:37: Keith McCandless: And so one of the premises of the book is that together we’re incredibly adaptive and creative. We saw that, and we thought we were just going to write a

00:02:48: Keith McCandless: new book about online. Well, once we opened the box,

00:02:54: Keith McCandless: much more happened.

00:02:58: Keith McCandless: We tried to hold what it is that the field has done with the work, and

00:03:03: Keith McCandless: there are a lot of different elements of that, and I know we’ll get to some of them

00:03:07: Keith McCandless: today, and we’ll try one of the new, one of the new-ish structures.

00:03:18: Keith McCandless: Do you want more depth, Johannes?

00:03:21: Johannes Schartau: No, that’s great. No, no, no, no.

00:03:22: Keith McCandless: Do you want me to be specific? Okay.

00:03:24: Johannes Schartau: Okay, yeah, that’s fantastic. My next question is actually: Which of the new structures are you personally most excited about, and what do they make possible that the existing Liberating Structures menu

00:03:37: Johannes Schartau: hadn’t been able to make possible?

00:03:43: Keith McCandless: Hmm. Well, you and I worked together on Strategy Knotworking, and I’d say that’s an important one for me, because it takes the…

00:03:52: Keith McCandless: It’s one of those structures that combines a bunch of others

00:03:56: Keith McCandless: for a big, complex activity in most organizations. So if you’re

00:04:03: Keith McCandless: saying, “Oh, you can use Liberating Structures to fix a dull meeting,”

00:04:11: Keith McCandless: of course, but can you use it to reshape

00:04:16: Keith McCandless: and include all voices, and do something really

00:04:20: Keith McCandless: smart with strategy in your organization? That’s another level, so that’s probably an important one.

00:04:28: Keith McCandless: The biggest thing that people will notice in the new book is that the principles have been brought forward, so each

00:04:37: Keith McCandless: structure is linked to a specific principle. And so it takes it up from, like, “Oh, this is a good tool,” to “This is part of an interrelated set of things we

00:04:53: Keith McCandless: believe in, a different way that a system, an organization operates.” So it…

00:05:02: Keith McCandless: You can still use each one as a separate tool. They’re modular. Each one can be fit into different places and does provide a function, and yet, simultaneously, they fit together through a set of principles.

00:05:19: Keith McCandless: And we make that more explicit.

00:05:22: Keith McCandless: For anybody who is a…

00:05:27: Keith McCandless: Well, I don’t think you have to be principle-driven. It’s just the work fits into a larger set of ideas.

00:05:37: Johannes Schartau: You just mentioned the Liberating Structures principles. Did you change any of those, or did you just put them more into the foreground and give them a bit more space and more connection to the individual structures?

00:05:50: Keith McCandless: More into the foreground, and we’ve illustrated them now, so they’re a little bit

00:05:58: Keith McCandless: more tangible, maybe?

00:06:01: Keith McCandless: Not just words on the page, but they’re illustrated.

00:06:05: Keith McCandless: And I think you know Thea is the illustrator that we use for the work.

00:06:12: Johannes Schartau: Yes, Thea Schukken. Shout-out to an amazing artist.

00:06:17: Johannes Schartau: So, next question would be…

00:06:21: Johannes Schartau: I heard that there will be ten new Liberating Structures added to the menu.

00:06:28: Johannes Schartau: Were there any of the existing ones that you changed significantly, or maybe even considered dropping, or is that basically the same?

00:06:39: Keith McCandless: They all have made it through. The existing, the legacy structures, we’re calling them legacy structures. They’ve all made it

00:06:49: Keith McCandless: into the 43, the expanded repertoire.

00:06:54: Keith McCandless: A couple were poorly named, and I take responsibility for this, so everybody’s going to have to get over a couple things, maybe, if you want to. This isn’t a, like, “Oh my God, the tablets have been brought down

00:07:10: Keith McCandless: from the mountaintop.” This is: you can take the work, and we’re going to open things up, so anybody who wants to make changes to how they’re using the work, either in the app,

00:07:24: Keith McCandless: if it’s you, Johannes, or in a course that they’re doing, or a workshop,

00:07:30: Keith McCandless: I’m here to help, and Nancy, too, to make the adaptations. But the couple name changes that you’re probably not going to like: TRIZ is this exquisite Russian engineering methodology.

00:07:45: Keith McCandless: What we published as TRIZ is

00:07:49: Keith McCandless: really just a small little part of that, and even then, it’s sort of a wild adaptation of what is there. So we’re calling that Creative Destruction, which is more centrally what it is, right?

00:08:03: Keith McCandless: It suggests that

00:08:06: Keith McCandless: you’ve got to move some things out of the way. If you’re going to get anything new, you have to creatively destroy some of what’s there.

00:08:14: Keith McCandless: So that’s still the same idea, basically the same set of steps,

00:08:19: Keith McCandless: but it has a new name.

00:08:21: Keith McCandless: The other one that’s also very popular is Options Place,

00:08:30: Keith McCandless: which is now replacing Open Space Technology. So similarly, we did a really creative version that was smaller and simpler.

00:08:40: Keith McCandless: And not everybody who loves Open Space Technology liked what we did.

00:08:50: Keith McCandless: That’s part of what the field was telling us and why we made some changes. So that’s called Options Place, and it includes now a wider range of

00:09:00: Keith McCandless: approaches that…

00:09:03: Keith McCandless: in which the participants shape the agenda in the moment. So if you use Lean Coffee, for example, or there’s a host of other

00:09:13: Keith McCandless: “give the pen to the participants,” you know, “make the agenda in the moment” methodologies. So we’re recognizing that there’s more than one way, and suggesting that Options Place is

00:09:28: Keith McCandless: something a little different, and maybe simpler

00:09:32: Keith McCandless: to use.

00:09:36: Keith McCandless: So yeah, everything went through, but those are the two big “I don’t like that” changes, probably, or people may not like the name changes.

00:09:47: Johannes Schartau: I’m getting so excited. You don’t have to name all ten new structures, but maybe you could give us some highlights? There’s also a question in the chat: Is Mad Tea now considered out of development? And I’ve seen that there is also a bit of change

00:10:02: Johannes Schartau: to Mad Tea. Could you just pick whatever you like and give us an idea of what we can expect?

00:10:10: Keith McCandless: Because I’ve been writing the book with Nancy for two years.

00:10:14: Keith McCandless: You get this directly, how challenging it is. I can recite them easily, but I’m not going to. But Mad Tea, hugely popular always. We have

00:10:27: Keith McCandless: combined Mad Tea and what we’re calling Calm Tea, and Calm Tea is the online version.

00:10:33: Keith McCandless: So, simultaneously with Mad Tea, Calm Tea now has an icon.

00:10:40: Keith McCandless: It has a set of

00:10:43: Keith McCandless: steps that includes both simultaneously. So if you’re hosting, you can go mad or calm

00:10:55: Keith McCandless: very easily. So yes, that made it into the formal repertoire. Something wildly popular that just had to be in there: Spiral Journal.

00:11:05: Keith McCandless: I think because so many people were…

00:11:10: Keith McCandless: It was kind of hard to show up all the way after COVID online.

00:11:15: Keith McCandless: So something that

00:11:18: Keith McCandless: gives you a chance to draw out more of your own imagination before you start interacting with others

00:11:25: Keith McCandless: is hugely important.

00:11:27: Keith McCandless: So Spiral Journal is there.

00:11:30: Keith McCandless: The Principles Walkaround

00:11:36: Keith McCandless: is there. So here we’re bringing more directly

00:11:41: Keith McCandless: what’s the difference between what you say is important and what you actually do?

00:11:47: Keith McCandless: Right, let’s bring that into the conversation. So it’s

00:11:53: Keith McCandless: a really important one. Another one, and this period, the 11 or 12 years in between the first book and now, this was a period of time in which

00:12:05: Keith McCandless: we could more confidently say, “This is how to… this is the minimum.”

00:12:10: Keith McCandless: So the other big idea is the minimum specifications. We only want to have the least,

00:12:17: Keith McCandless: the smallest set of rules that get things done.

00:12:21: Keith McCandless: So, for something like Griefwalking: Oh my God, can you

00:12:28: Keith McCandless: collect people in a way and invite them to show up for each other when they’re experiencing a loss. So what’s the minimum you need to safely do to support

00:12:43: Keith McCandless: addressing a loss together?

00:12:48: Keith McCandless: And I’ve used it enough

00:12:51: Keith McCandless: to be confident that we’ve had those minimum specs.

00:12:55: Keith McCandless: For something as…

00:12:58: Keith McCandless: maybe you might think that’s tricky, or you wouldn’t want to run a Griefwalking.

00:13:04: Keith McCandless: But we became confident enough over these dozen years to put things like that into the repertoire.

00:13:12: Keith McCandless: Another very… okay, you’ve got to cut me off if I’m going too far, because I can keep…

00:13:19: Keith McCandless: Keep going a little more? Okay, two more that I really adore.

00:13:24: Keith McCandless: One is called…

00:13:28: Keith McCandless: Oh God, it’s so funny, because we did change the name of it, but we originally called it Network Pattern Cards.

00:13:37: Keith McCandless: But really, it’s Network Pattern Relationships.

00:13:40: Keith McCandless: And so there are ten patterns that organize how people relate.

00:13:49: Keith McCandless: If you diagram them, you can see that we kind of think the way that we’ve organized our network is just

00:13:58: Keith McCandless: inviolable, or it’s just the way it is. But you can actually shift your pattern

00:14:03: Keith McCandless: underneath all of those relationships. And that particular Liberating Structure

00:14:12: Keith McCandless: deepens possibilities, and I use it very frequently. Again, we became confident that we had something

00:14:19: Keith McCandless: important to share there.

00:14:23: Keith McCandless: And it’s been illustrated more

00:14:28: Keith McCandless: beautifully. Last one is Strategy Knotworking. It’s kind of like Purpose-To-Practice, if you’re familiar, and I think most people here are very familiar with the repertoire, but

00:14:40: Keith McCandless: let’s go higher and deeper

00:14:45: Keith McCandless: simultaneously, and beyond just projects.

00:14:49: Keith McCandless: What’s your strategy for all the projects at the same time?

00:14:55: Keith McCandless: And so that one was hard to put together because of the

00:14:59: Keith McCandless: complexity, the number of choices you can make there. So we also started to define, in a string,

00:15:07: Keith McCandless: what is an anchoring Liberating Structure? What’s the thing that you’re going to get

00:15:13: Keith McCandless: the most action out of in your string?

00:15:17: Keith McCandless: So there, we have options for each element of six questions for Strategy Knotworking, and we identify an anchor Liberating Structure.

00:15:28: Keith McCandless: You can just do 1-2-4-All to answer six questions, or you can anchor each one in something that goes a little deeper. So…

00:15:37: Keith McCandless: You know, the real tension in all of the new ones is to get to the minimum specs,

00:15:43: Keith McCandless: try not to go on and on and on about all the cool things you can do as a

00:15:48: Keith McCandless: facilitator, but rather make it simple enough for somebody who doesn’t call themselves a coach, a consultant, a facilitator, just somebody who wants a better result.

00:16:03: Keith McCandless: So, okay, I went on

00:16:06: Keith McCandless: maybe too far, but that’s…

00:16:08: Johannes Schartau: No, that’s absolutely…

00:16:09: Keith McCandless: Those are some of the ones.

00:16:11: Johannes Schartau: Maybe the last one: do you have a rough timeline for us? When can we expect to see those changes, the book, the new website?

00:16:20: Johannes Schartau: Any idea?

00:16:23: Keith McCandless: Yeah, the manuscript… Nancy and I are making, today or tomorrow, the very final manuscript that can be uploaded onto IngramSpark and Amazon.

00:16:39: Keith McCandless: It’s ready, with a couple of little itty-bitty changes. And really, now we’re…

00:16:45: Keith McCandless: The thing that might slow us down a little is getting a new website up.

00:16:53: Keith McCandless: Mostly because we were waiting for the very, very final manuscript, and there’s a lot of detail in there. So June 1 is a reasonable

00:17:03: Keith McCandless: time in which you could buy the book.

00:17:08: Keith McCandless: Yeah, well, oh my God.

00:17:12: Keith McCandless: There it is. I want to put something… I know I probably shouldn’t do this, but I’m going to put an image in chat. We have a cover. Let’s see if I can actually make

00:17:23: Keith McCandless: things work here. But continue, if you have another question.

00:17:29: Keith McCandless: I can…

00:17:30: Johannes Schartau: I do. So one thing is that we have Liberating Structures as these tools that we can use, and they’re described, and then we have the principles. And from spending time with you, just talking,

00:17:44: Johannes Schartau: and getting to know you, I know that there’s also a very specific way of looking at certain things that maybe

00:17:53: Johannes Schartau: you haven’t fully put into words, but that I’ve been noticing and maybe absorbing a bit while spending time with you. And while I have you, I kind of want to,

00:18:06: Johannes Schartau: as always, cause a bit of mischief, or make people see something that they will never be able to unsee.

00:18:13: Johannes Schartau: So I’ll just try to open a little gap here in people’s thinking. There’s a specific sentence that I wanted to ask you about. You stated this a while ago, and you said something like, “I don’t believe in whole-system change for one second anymore.”

00:18:32: Johannes Schartau: So the idea that we can actually go into any kind of system, any organization, or

00:18:39: Johannes Schartau: group, or whatever it is, and that we believe we can fully flip the entire system at once. Could you elaborate a bit on that? Why are you saying this? What do you mean?

00:18:53: Keith McCandless: Yeah. It’s a good starting point

00:19:01: Keith McCandless: for understanding the foundation of the work, which is complexity science, and I’m going to try not to be nerdy about that.

00:19:13: Keith McCandless: But the suggestion at the core is that these are patterns

00:19:20: Keith McCandless: that repeat,

00:19:23: Keith McCandless: like the pattern of your lungs or a root system, and the patterns that are in each of these structures that you can pluck out and put in a thing create a different pattern that’s more creative and more adaptable.

00:19:41: Keith McCandless: And we’re actually suggesting that it’s

00:19:44: Keith McCandless: reliable. It happens every time if you follow the minimum specifications. And so we’re shifting the pattern at the most fundamental

00:19:57: Keith McCandless: relationship level. So the pattern of our relationships is what determines, in theory, and in practice it seems to be true, this pattern of relating, if you can shift it, it fundamentally is

00:20:13: Keith McCandless: at the level of this conversation we’re having right now, at the level of a small group. And shifting that pattern is the point of

00:20:22: Keith McCandless: the work, is at the core of the work, and

00:20:26: Keith McCandless: if you establish it at this fundamental level, it repeats all the way up.

00:20:35: Keith McCandless: Right? It’s a fractal pattern.

00:20:38: Keith McCandless: And so most whole-system change starts at the opposite end. Let’s

00:20:45: Keith McCandless: decide the whole system needs to change, and they ignore all of the things down at the fundamental

00:20:52: Keith McCandless: level. And that’s what I’m… when I made that… I tend to go for strident

00:21:00: Keith McCandless: statements that get me in trouble later, but that one…

00:21:04: Keith McCandless: it’s an important one, right? And so I have colleagues who really love the work, but they steep themselves in whole-system change. And when they send me what they’re going to do in their consulting work, it’s always starting at this big level, and I’m like, let’s flip it.

00:21:23: Keith McCandless: I want to flip your script completely. We want to start with Spiral Journal. Like, what do you think

00:21:29: Keith McCandless: is going on here, and then maybe talk with one other person, and shift that fundamental relating pattern. That’s where the action is, not at the

00:21:39: Keith McCandless: “let’s change the vision” level.

00:21:47: Johannes Schartau: So what you’re trying…

00:21:48: Keith McCandless: That’s me.

00:21:49: Johannes Schartau: More on this relationship level. Most people

00:21:55: Johannes Schartau: in change management would say that there is something like, we define a target state,

00:22:01: Johannes Schartau: we define steps that will take us there. We measure our progress, and then at some point we have arrived. Can you just give us an idea of what the alternative is? So you said you target really small changes, how people interact,

00:22:17: Johannes Schartau: what the relationships are like. Could you just unpack that a bit for us?

00:22:23: Keith McCandless: Yeah. So, in biology, Stuart Kauffman described this, the adjacent possible.

00:22:34: Keith McCandless: And what that means is there’s

00:22:37: Keith McCandless: for human organizations, there are these little elements that are kind of discrete, but they do fit together. So as you explore them as an individual, and a pair, and a group of four,

00:22:50: Keith McCandless: the change, the shift in the organization is going to come from

00:22:57: Keith McCandless: doing experiments that combine and recombine those adjacent

00:23:03: Keith McCandless: bits of information, or actions, or prototypes. And that’s what makes

00:23:13: Keith McCandless: a difference in creatively adapting

00:23:17: Keith McCandless: to a situation. And so,

00:23:28: Keith McCandless: I guess what we…

00:23:30: Keith McCandless: We want to have this big idea that’s going to pull us forward, but most of the time… So what I’m starting to measure, let’s just get down to real things, what I’m starting to measure are the things that are important to me, and they’re three things.

00:23:44: Keith McCandless: And I think, rather than trying to establish what the goal is, I want to measure these as the work is unfolding. And the first thing is, is the quality of our relationship deepening in some way?

00:23:58: Keith McCandless: And participants can tell you whether

00:24:01: Keith McCandless: the relationship is deepening in the interaction or not. So it’s measurable. Second thing is, are some new options, some new adjacent possibilities, starting to take shape?

00:24:14: Keith McCandless: Also, people in this…

00:24:16: Keith McCandless: Like, right now, maybe they are, maybe they aren’t. Maybe this has been a dull interview, I don’t know.

00:24:22: Keith McCandless: But they know. Each person knows. And so I want that measured as we go. It could be ten minutes into a thing, or after a meeting. Third thing is, is there some kind of

00:24:36: Keith McCandless: context that we’re getting clearer on?

00:24:40: Keith McCandless: Is there kind of a map of reality, a story, a narrative we can tell ourselves, something

00:24:46: Keith McCandless: that gives us more clarity about the context? So…

00:24:52: Keith McCandless: And when you take those three together, you start to measure, are we more capable of adapting creatively?

00:25:02: Keith McCandless: Are relationships deepening? It could be with yourself, you with the group. Are some really new things popping into view that could be old things, but now they seem possible?

00:25:13: Keith McCandless: And then are we getting a little clearer about the map moving forward? And if you’re getting all of those things, that would be the primary measurement of

00:25:23: Keith McCandless: how I think

00:25:25: Keith McCandless: we’re going to make progress, not moving toward a goal, a predetermined objective that very likely is going to be too small very soon into the work that you’re doing together. You’re underestimating what’s possible almost always.

00:25:45: Keith McCandless: And you get sucked into it, like, “Okay, that’s what we’re supposed to be doing,” rather than going, using all of our imagination

00:25:53: Keith McCandless: and our resolve to make a difference, which the kind of measurement I just mentioned

00:26:00: Keith McCandless: draws out more of. It’s what I care about the most, and I think it’s a better way of measuring making progress together.

00:26:11: Johannes Schartau: Okay, so let’s start to wrap this up. Last…

00:26:18: Johannes Schartau: second-to-last question, and I just want to emphasize that this is not a rhetorical question.

00:26:23: Johannes Schartau: I really want to have your opinion on this. Do you see the Liberating Structures menu growing even further in the future, or do you feel like now it’s kind of complete, or maybe there’s a point at which it just becomes too big?

00:26:36: Johannes Schartau: What’s your… I know you’re just in the process of publishing this, so this is maybe the worst time to ask, but what’s your feeling about this at the moment?

00:26:48: Keith McCandless: There’s no end in sight. There will never be.

00:26:52: Keith McCandless: So, what we did in the book… yeah, well,

00:26:59: Keith McCandless: what we did in the book was work with one person and tell a story about working with her to take something she’d been working on for ten years and had a lot of success with, but never wrote it up

00:27:10: Keith McCandless: in a way that anybody could use it. Never wrote it up with minimum specifications, never wrote it up with the ambitions that we have for any Liberating Structure, which is

00:27:24: Keith McCandless: simple enough to use, sort of modular, it fits in with the other Liberating Structures,

00:27:31: Keith McCandless: it’s usually fun, and some other things.

00:27:38: Keith McCandless: So we wrote up one, and as far as I’m concerned, we got it into a form like all the others.

00:27:47: Keith McCandless: It needs more field testing, so it’s not in the formal repertoire, but we wrote up how you do that.

00:27:54: Keith McCandless: And so, since

00:27:56: Keith McCandless: the book is about to be published, there are at least three or four that people are bringing up right now, that they’re kind of using the method,

00:28:08: Keith McCandless: and they’re really good, and they should be. And we

00:28:11: Keith McCandless: haven’t done it yet, but we want to create a Liberating Structures Commons that’s not Slack, but rather something like Circle or some other place where people can support each other

00:28:22: Keith McCandless: in a better way and develop structures like crazy, as they will.

00:28:31: Keith McCandless: And so, Revealing Metaphors

00:28:35: Keith McCandless: isn’t in the repertoire. It’s talked about in the book, but it’s not in the repertoire. And there’s a bunch of others like that. Like, if you use Tiny Monsters or Tiny Demons,

00:28:49: Keith McCandless: Fisher kind of resists some of the formalization

00:28:57: Keith McCandless: for reasons, because his imagination cannot be held back, if you know Fisher. So there’s that one. I wrote it up, but I couldn’t get him, you know, I wrote it up,

00:29:09: Keith McCandless: but I needed him as a partner to

00:29:13: Keith McCandless: formalize it, and we just ran out of time. So there are probably ten more really ready to join the repertoire.

00:29:23: Keith McCandless: And I think… I don’t know what that’s going to mean. I know that already we can’t fit the icons and the names on a

00:29:34: Keith McCandless: screen anymore, right? It’s too many. But there’s no reason, because of the nature of this community and the nature of the work, there’s no way to limit it. It would be

00:29:48: Keith McCandless: nutty. And the only other really relevant thing, and thanks for the help from you, Johannes, is that we’re changing the Creative Commons license a bit.

00:30:00: Keith McCandless: Before, we were fully non-commercial, so now we have a

00:30:04: Keith McCandless: Creative Commons license that includes commercial activity.

00:30:13: Keith McCandless: Okay.

00:30:14: Keith McCandless: You know, we’re kicking out the jams, so to speak. Kicking out the jams.

00:30:20: Johannes Schartau: Final question. When you look at the global Liberating Structures community,

00:30:25: Johannes Schartau: what experiments are happening right now that get you the most excited?

00:30:39: Keith McCandless: I love it when somebody writes me a note and says,

00:30:45: Keith McCandless: one recent one, I’ll just use an example. I’m so excited about it. She’s a Rhodes Scholar, or got a big scholarship, you know, in Norway.

00:30:56: Keith McCandless: She’s working on a really cool project for children to respect and clean up the ocean.

00:31:03: Keith McCandless: And so she’s a faculty member, got this scholarship, and

00:31:09: Keith McCandless: as she’s doing this really intense research,

00:31:14: Keith McCandless: she also wants to include intergenerational action research on the ocean, and how it is

00:31:23: Keith McCandless: we… the ocean has a memory, the ocean is an entity, and we need to include a lot of different people in shaping how we respond to that.

00:31:35: Keith McCandless: And so I get to witness someone who’s using

00:31:43: Keith McCandless: the work. I try to help a little, but I get to witness somebody who’s wildly creative trying to do something so important in the world that makes a huge difference.

00:31:52: Keith McCandless: There’s a lot of that, and it’s a privileged position, because people think I might be able to help. And so I hear a lot of good stories, and I get to give my opinion on what a string might be.

00:32:07: Keith McCandless: What a string might be.

00:32:11: Keith McCandless: And bring the new Liberating Structures into that

00:32:15: Keith McCandless: string,

00:32:17: Keith McCandless: into the larger thinking about what are we going to do about the ocean? Oh, my.

00:32:24: Keith McCandless: So that’s…

00:32:26: Keith McCandless: I think individually, I think there’s some global thing I could say, but individually supporting the individual’s work is probably the most exciting thing

00:32:38: Keith McCandless: for me. The other one I mentioned, the measurement thing, I’m prototyping that measurement approach.

00:32:45: Keith McCandless: I’m trying to call it the Spidergram Mirror. There are a lot of silly things I’m doing with prototypes, but the basic idea is that we should measure what we really care about that’s about the pattern of relationships. So let’s get on that.

00:32:59: Keith McCandless: So personally, that’s my commitment, to take that measurement approach

00:33:05: Keith McCandless: more seriously.

00:33:08: Johannes Schartau: Fantastic.

00:33:09: Johannes Schartau: Thank you so much for your time. As always, this podcast is sponsored by Holisticon.

00:33:15: Johannes Schartau: We have developed the Liberating Structures app that you can check out on the Google Play Store and the Apple App Store.

00:33:23: Johannes Schartau: And if you want to

00:33:25: Johannes Schartau: get more information about the company, you can go to holisticon.de.

00:33:30: Johannes Schartau: Please don’t miss our next transform together session on May 19 at 9 a.m.

00:33:37: Johannes Schartau: Central European Summer Time, because I will be talking to Joshua Arnold. He’s from New Zealand, and he has the website Black Swan Farming. We’re going to be talking about Cost of Delay,

00:33:48: Johannes Schartau: ProductDevOps, and, of course, AI.

00:33:51: Johannes Schartau: See you then.