Almost a Decade of Liberating Structures in Belgium: What I Stopped Selling
I found Liberating Structures at a meetup. One room, one evening, no plan to build anything on top of it. A few months later I was hosting one of the first Immersion Workshops in Belgium, in Brussels. I hadn't planned that step either. It just happened, the way it does when something clicks before you can explain why.
That was almost ten years ago.
I carried the structures into rooms that weren't built for them. Agile Consortium. XP Days Benelux. These were conferences full of people who worked with their own hands on how organizations collaborate, not an audience you convince with a slide, an audience that had already spent years fighting the same broken meetings I had. A structuring invitation landed differently there. People recognized the problem before I finished describing it.
What changed
Here is what shifted, and it took me longer to notice than it should have. I've gotten quieter about the method and louder about the problem it solves. I believe in it just as much as I did at the start. More, if anything, I've since watched it work more times than I can count. But I don't sell the tool anymore. A carpenter doesn't hand you a hammer catalog.
I wasn't always this careful about the difference. There was a period, earlier on, where I got that balance wrong, and I only felt the discomfort of it much later. I'm not going to dress that up as a lesson with a bow on it. It's just true, and it's part of why I talk differently now than I did in that first Brussels workshop.
The community around this work has changed too, in ways I've watched up close rather than read about, most visibly over the last two editions of the LS Gathering. The room isn't the same room I walked into a decade ago. Neither am I.
What hasn't changed is the thing that first pulled me in: the silence after a structuring invitation, right before people start talking to each other instead of at a facilitator. I'm glad that's still there. The day I stop finding that silence exciting, I'll have lost something.
If any of this lines up with your own ten years, or your first one, I'd like to hear it, reply, or email me.