My first all-staff meeting had a full agenda, with speeches and several activities. The part I keep thinking about is the session at the end of the day that used the “What I Need From You (WINFY)” structure. Departments named, out loud and directly, what they needed from each other to do their work well. Each request got one of four answers. Yes. No. I will try. Or a question to make the request clearer. It surfaced cross-departmental friction, got buy-in for change, and came from the group rather than being dictated from above.

In my recent board meeting, we needed to think about revenue diversification. The board was new to me, and I was new to them. I did not know who tended to speak and who tended to hold back, and they had no settled pattern with me. Rather than open the floor and reinforce the dynamic from previous meetings, I got them out of the seats and ran 25/10 Crowd Sourcing. Everyone wrote down a bold idea. The cards moved around the room. People scored ideas they did not write and could not trace. In about thirty minutes, the board had generated and ranked its own list, and the strongest ideas rose without anyone needing to champion them.

I chose both of these on purpose, and the purpose was the same in each room.

Getting people to talk is not the hard part of facilitation. The hard part is getting everyone to contribute. In a typical meeting, often the loudest voices and the most confident personalities crowd out the quieter expertise in the corner. As a new leader, I need to hear from all of the voices.

This is why I lean so heavily on Liberating Structures. They are a set of simple, repeatable formats that make meetings interactive and collaborative. Each one is built to include and engage every person in the room rather than the few who are quickest to speak. You can string together a series of them to achieve almost any meeting goal that teams with common missions face.

I have mentioned Liberating Structures in passing before, but I have never given the approach its due, and this is a good moment to do that. Keith McCandless and Nancy White have just published the Liberating Structures Fieldbook: Flipping the Script on Meetings, Planning and Progress. It is the first major update since the original 2014 book, and it reflects a decade of the practice in use, including the shift to online and hybrid facilitation that the pandemic forced. The menu has grown from thirty-three structures to forty-three, with ten new ones, and every structure now carries guidance for both in-person and online settings. The refreshed website at liberatingstructures.com is free, and the core material is licensed under Creative Commons, so the barrier to trying one is close to zero.

For anyone who runs meetings, and especially for anyone stepping into a new role where the quality of your early conversations sets the tone for everything after, this is a resource worth knowing well. The two meetings I described were among the most useful I have run since I started, and that was not because of anything I said in them. It was because of how they were built.