The intern has the answer, but nobody asks her.
Recognize this situation? Below are the Liberating Structures that change it — a concrete example, and the reason this one fits here. New to Liberating Structures? Here's what it is.
Heard, Seen, Respected (HSR): and once she says it, she needs to feel that it landed.
For example: The intern has been working in customer service for three months and knows exactly which workaround customers use to get around the broken order process. Nobody in the management meeting asks her — the meeting is made up of people with a title, not people who use the system every day.
Liberating Structures for this situation:
Discovery & Action Dialogue (DAD)
Discovery & Action Dialogue is built around exactly this kind of hidden knowledge: in small groups of five to seven, a host walks through a fixed set of seven questions without answering any of them themselves. One is literally: "Do you know someone who regularly solves this problem? What approach made that possible?"
That question doesn't look up the hierarchy for an answer — it looks at whoever's in the middle of it, exactly where the intern is. The structure creates the moment where her knowledge gets asked for, instead of waiting for someone to happen to think of her.
Heard, Seen, Respected (HSR)
Heard, Seen, Respected takes over after the answer: the intern shares her story with one partner, who can only listen and ask "what happened next?" — no jumping to fix it, no downplaying it.
That's the difference between being heard and just briefly having the floor: the partner reflects back afterward what came through, so the intern actually feels her input landed — not just noted, but understood.
No certification, no lengthy prep — read the steps and try it at your next meeting.
Keep exploring
Browse the full list of 43 structures, or get support if this situation is too complex to facilitate yourself.