On Thursday we welcomed nearly 50 health and care folk from organisations across the country in a range of roles and services- from ambulances to speech therapy and lots in between. The focus was how to use Liberating Structures for work in a virtual setting.

Slides from the session are here https://bit.ly/QLibStructures1

Despite this essentially being a meeting about how to run meetings, the thing that really shone from the session was the sense of connection between people meeting for the first time, and the recognition that so many had shared similar experiences through lockdown. Here’s a few quick thoughts, based on some of the feedback:

“Laughter in a meeting; low stakes conversations”: I’ve long felt that serious work doesn’t always have to be taken seriously- it’s very hard to be creative without having fun. I love the idea of low stakes conversations, that with increasingly hectic workloads every decision matters, so allowing space for people to take it easy can offer some remedy to that
“We need to reinvent the way we run meetings and not try to replicate (bad) face to face meetings online”: this was a really strong theme, that we shouldn’t lazily recreate the way we used to do things, bringing the negative aspects along with the positives. We have a great opportunity to take stock of the format of work as we begin to take steps back into physical environments, and to reflect on some of the benefits that virtual work has provided
“It feels really safe to practice LS here”: our intention was always that this run as a playground, and an opportunity for people to learn together
“It was nice to realise that not everyone is an LS master!”: this has always been what attracted me to Liberating Structures- that you can get involved and run sessions without having spent months in deep immersion or paying for an unnecessary accreditation. They’re designed for anyone to adapt for their own purposes

We obviously have things we need to improve in the meetup- some felt that lunchtime made it tricky as thoughts of food started to dominate. Others felt that we needed more time, so we could properly debrief from each structure. We also definitely need to up our game on some of the finer elements of using Zoom for large groups etc, but we learnt loads.

As is often the way with virtual meetups like this, the greatest feedback is people’s smiles as they rejoin the main room from breakouts. That sounds really naff, and I’m unapologetic about it.