During this Liberating Structures strategy for Scrum meetup we addressed dealing with uncertainty — a particularly useful skill in highly competitive markets. Learn more about how to train and grow the resilience of your team when dealing with the unexpected.
Created by Keith McCandless and Henri Lipmanowicz, Liberating Structures cover a set of easy to learn, yet powerful ways to collaborate as a team—even as a (very) large team by Scrum standards—, overcoming traditional communications approaches like presentations, managed discussions, or another disorganized brainstorming at which the loudest participants tend to prevail.
Generally, Liberating Structures are well suited to improve the level of engagement among participants of Scrum events, thus stimulating the kind of outcomes that are necessary to create learning organizations. Liberating Structures also provide an excellent toolbox to handle Product Backlog refinements or improving the Definition of Done of an engineering organization.
Lastly, Liberating Structures are a great tool when Scrum Teams come together for figuring out where to go next, particularly in highly competitive markets where nimble startups are everywhere.
To learn how to deal with uncertainty, we chose one of the advanced Liberating Structures microstructures — Critical Uncertainties:
What is made possible? You can help a diverse group quickly test the viability of current strategies and build its capacity to respond quickly to future challenges. This Liberating Structure prepares a group for strategy making. It does not produce a plan to be implemented as designed but rather builds resilience: the capacity to actively shape the system and be prepared to respond to surprise. This means being better able to see different futures unfolding, better prepared to act in a distributed fashion, and more ready to absorb disruptions resiliently. (Source.)
Regarding Berlin’s volatile startup scene and the resulting continuous pressure for Scrum teams to outperform expectations of stakeholders, the microstructure seemed particularly well-suited for an exploration.
Usually, the Hands-on Agile meetups addressing Liberating Structures for Scrum are not created by a design team in advance as there is no standard string that we explore or follow. Designing a Liberating Structures Daily Scrum string is a task for every participant. Not so this time, however, as the microstructure we chose to explore — Critical Uncertainties — requires too much time for a 2-hours evening event. So, this time, we skipped the string design part and focused on understanding the microstructure in depth.
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Given the vastly different background of the attendees of a meetup, we use once again a prepared narrative — the MegaBrain.io scenario — as common ground to practice Liberating Structures’ Critical Uncertainties microstructure. A previous attempt based on climate change did not work well, as the topic turned out to be too broad, resulting in a wildly diverging list of factors.
Back to the MegaBrain.io scenario:
A year ago, MegaBrain.io was a well-funded, Berlin-based hopeful in the race to improve schooling by creating tailored curricula for each student derived from an AI.
Today, MegaBrain.io’s situation is dire:
We practiced Critical Uncertainties according to the manual:
Given that about 30 people attended the Liberating Structures strategy meetup, creating four working groups to address each quadrant was no challenge.
The first result of the evening was a list of factors that would threaten MegaBrain.io’s ability to operate successfully. We clustered the results, dot-voted and then chose the two factors that would provide the axes: a) the certainty of acquiring new funding and b) team morale.
The next step was forming four teams and creating three or more strategies for each of the quadrants. The groups identified the following scenarios:
In the end, we did not manage to identify a single robust strategy for MegaBrain.io. However, there was a consensus among the participants that Liberating Structures’ Critical Uncertainties is a well-suited exercise to prepare an organization to deal with uncertainty as well as for inspection and adaptation of existing strategies.
Liberating Structures proved again to be an exceptionally useful tool to facilitate inclusive events that tackle significant challenges, such as dealing with uncertainty. The sooner you start this process, the less likely your organization will follow in the footsteps of MegaBrain.io.
Have you used Liberating Structures to facilitate building resilience? If so, please share your findings with us in the comments.
Liberating Structures are developed by Henri Lipmanowicz and Keith McCandless and are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
📅 🎓 Berlin, February 18-20, 2020: Professional Scrum Training plus Liberating Structures — three immersive Days for Scrum Masters .
Liberating Structures for Scrum (1): The Sprint Retrospective.
Liberating Structures for Scrum (2): The Sprint Planning.
Liberating Structures for Scrum (3): The Product Backlog.
Liberating Structures for Scrum (4): The Daily Scrum
You can secure your seat for Scrum training classes, workshops, and meetups directly by following the corresponding link in the table below:
See all upcoming classes here.
You can book your seat for the training directly by following the corresponding links to the ticket shop. If the procurement process of your organization requires a different purchasing process, please contact Berlin Product People GmbH directly.
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