Situations

Recognize your organisational situation, and discover which Liberating Structures can help.

Who speaks, who stays silent

• The same three people always speak first.
• Whoever shouts loudest wins the argument — not whoever is right.
• The intern has the answer, but nobody asks her.
• Everyone waits for the manager to nod before saying anything.
• If nobody objects, we call that consensus.
• The people on the floor have known what's wrong for months; leadership is only hearing it now.
• Whoever doubts the most stays silent the longest — and often has the most to say.

Agreements that don't hold

• We've made this decision three times already — and it still isn't made.
• Everyone nods in the meeting; the resistance shows up in the hallway.
• We say yes in the room and no on the shop floor.
• Everyone assumed someone else would pick it up.
• Nobody remembers who promised what anymore.
• Whoever had the most power before the meeting was also right afterwards.
• Every Monday we restart a conversation that seemed closed on Friday.

Goals that don't add up

• The real agenda is never the one that's announced.
• Everyone knows the strategy by heart — and everyone pulls in a different direction.
• What one department rewards, another one punishes.
• Every individual target makes sense on its own; added up, they don't deliver the result anyone wanted.
• On paper the priority is clear; in practice, whatever's urgent today wins.
• Two teams are working on the same problem — and neither one knows about the other.
• What "good" means differs from floor to floor in the same building.

Change that doesn't stick

• The new system works perfectly. Nobody uses it.
• The change gets explained beautifully — and then nobody lives it.
• The pilot group proves it works. After that, nobody hears about it again.
• We call it "resistance." In reality, no one ever listened to their objections.
• Every reorganisation feels like the last one — only the logo is new.
• The change was announced top-down, and it stays top-down.

The limits of facilitation

• The decision has already been made — what follows is just a sales pitch.
• The distrust has been set in stone for years — deeper than any one session can reach.
• The right people aren't in the room — and the session is being asked to settle something they can't decide.

Blind spots

• Nobody dares to say out loud what would make this project fail.
• Everyone can recite the mission statement flawlessly; nobody still knows why it matters.
• The team decides on the user experience without a single user ever in the room.
• Every strategy session starts with a risk list — never with a picture of success.
• Whoever asks for help always gets the same kind of help — regardless of what's needed.
• Every new idea gets thoroughly judged before it's allowed to try anything.
• Nobody has the full journey mapped out — only their own piece of it.
• What gets said about colleagues when they're not in the room is almost never positive.
• We say certain principles matter, but nobody ever checks whether daily work still reflects them.