Happy courses do some similar kinds of Liberating Structures intros. Take a look: https://www.happy.co.uk/leadership-and-personal-development/personal-development-programmes/using-liberating-structures-online/

Happy Henry himself might be up for a chat, if that might help.

The webpage shows some of the good ones to start with – short, fun, impactful.
Don’t bother two much with clarifying the concepts at the outset – in with the actual practice is usually best 😉

Can you work with a few pharmacists colleagues to see what big challenges/questions they currently have – which you can then use as the focus of the structures you use?

If people can see real help immediately emerging for their current challenges, I think they’ll be fairly impressed.

If you want to try out any structures in the same space of the Q use group, we have a planning meeting next month, filling in the slots for the rest of the year: https://q.health.org.uk/event/liberating-structures-user-group-5/

We’re also toying with creating a short video on what Liberating Structures can do to help health & care staff – as nothing like that seems to exist, as far as we can tell.
I hope we’re able to go ahead with it!

Hi Phil,

I’m conscious that you know your audience so you’ll know what might be helpful to get them started! We’ve delivered a lot of face to face sessions on Leadership Skills for Engaging Staff in Quality and Patient Safety over a day with approximately 50 staff… Online changes the dynamic a bit but I’ve included some suggestions below in case it prompts something that may transfer…

In the design, you might need to consider:
– do you want to focus on how they can use LS to improve their leadership skills for engagement, use LS for actively working on QI challenges or a mix of both!
– if introducing LS, it can be helpful to explore what happens when the workforce becomes engaged, how does my role as a leader change, how do power dynamics / psychological safety/ learned helplessness etc impact engagement and that they may need to be persistent if the culture has predominately been control and command, and
– consider where they are based – community, acutes etc and tailor accordingly to support building networks / relationships for further work together…

Building on what Matthew said, I always think it’s worthwhile identifying a few big challenges/questions to help focus sessions on practical improvements they may wish to make. If you had these, you could also use break out rooms and do something like Wisecrowds online – ask everyone to download the app in advance.

I also like the idea of using something like TRIZ to explore a challege like medication safety or like reducing waste in high tech drugs and build in 15% solutions for the follow up.

Another option is to do something like Simple Ethnography and ask people to do it in advance – it could an observation of medication preparation, communications between teams.

A few years ago, we developed a Toolkit that we used for leaders who wanted to develop their skills for engaging staff in quality improvement. It goes against the freedom of LS in some ways because the benefit is the choice you have to choose what works best for you and your style. However, we found that some healthcare staff were asking for a place to start and wanted to build their experience. So we developed this. It’s on our list to be updated but it might give you some ideas if you thought a few of your colleagues wanted to begin with listening sessions for their staff and then moving into what are the top things we could improve together… This is the link https://www.hse.ie/eng/about/who/qid/staff-engagement/leadership-skills-for-engaging-staff-valuing-voices.html

It shares how you can use a few examples of LS and how they can be used in a flow to help tackle common challenges.

Can also be helpful to signpost to this group LS to support strategic planning/ service review… like Ecocycle Planning.

Best of luck with it all.

Matthew – I think you should definitely go ahead with the video! We’ve mentioned LS a few times in QPSTalkTime but haven’t done a short intro piece and I think it would be wonderful to have something to signpost people to!

HI Phil,

We facilitate meetings for our digital advocates network which is currently 116 people. We have an in person meeting once per quarter. For the last meeting we tried using Lean Coffee methodology. This basically means that everyone submits an agenda item, in true LC methods the group then vote on what they want to discuss and the top 3 get discussed. We ended up being a bit more free form than that. Also only about 10 of the advocates were able to attend. We have a good number of advocates who are very active in the group and some we never see or hear from. To address this we’ve put together a Loop workspace with a voting table and will be encouraging people to submit and vote on agenda items for the next in person meeting. Despite the relatively small turn out it was always our ambition to have the advocates set the agenda, this method aloud for that to happen for the first time, so I’m a big fan of it.