15% Solutions
Each person answers: "what is your 15 percent — where do you have discretion and freedom to act on this challenge right now, without more resources or authority?" Lists are shar…
toolbox · all sources
Liberating Structures
openaligned IDG relationpractice-based43 structures (33 legacy repertoire + 10 recently added)
A repertoire of 43 simple interaction patterns ("microstructures") that replace conventional meeting formats by including and engaging everyone — for collaboration, innovation, and self-organization in groups of any size.
liberatingstructures.com/ — Keith McCandless & Henri Lipmanowicz
License: CC BY-SA 4.0 (verified in site footer, 2026-08-25)
From the collaboration doc
Proposed by Pontus Holmgren.
“A set of 33+ simple, interactive facilitation techniques designed to replace traditional, top-down meetings by including and unleashing everyone to foster collaboration, innovation, and self-organization.” — Pontus Holmgren
Tools from this source (43)
25/10 Crowd Sourcing
The whole room generates bold ideas on cards ("if you were ten times bolder…"), then mills and swaps cards while scoring each passing idea 1–5 over five rounds. Scores add to 25…
Agreement & Certainty Matrix
Groups sort their challenges onto a 2×2: how much do we agree about what to do, and how certain are we about cause and effect? Simple, complicated, complex, and chaotic work eac…
Appreciative Interviews
In pairs, people interview each other for a success story — a time they worked on a challenge and are proud of what happened — then quartets distill the conditions that made suc…
Celebrity Interview
A leader or expert is interviewed talk-show style with questions that reach for the person behind the role — struggles, doubts, stories — while pairs in the audience formulate f…
Conversation Café
Small tables of 5–7 make sense of a profound or troubling theme through four rounds with a talking object: two rounds where each person speaks uninterrupted, an open conversatio…
Creative Destruction (aka TRIZ)
Serious fun with a subversive question: "what could we do to reliably achieve the WORST possible result?" Groups list that anti-recipe, then — the uncomfortable step — mark ever…
Critical Uncertainties
Fast scenario planning: the group picks its two most critical and most uncertain factors, crosses them into four plausible futures, and small groups develop a strategy for opera…
Design StoryBoards
Meeting design as explicit craft: before an important session, sketch its arc frame by frame — purpose, participants, and which structure fills each block of time — the way film…
Discovery & Action Dialogue (DAD)
A facilitated dialogue built on positive deviance: through seven fixed questions, a group discovers who among them is already solving a chronic problem against the odds, what th…
Drawing Together
Participants tell the story of a challenge and their journey through it using only five symbols — circle, rectangle, triangle, spiral, star-person — drawn, not spoken. Drawings…
Ecocycle Planning
The group maps its full portfolio of activities onto the ecocycle — birth, maturity, creative destruction, renewal — and looks for what is stuck in rigidity traps (kept alive to…
Folding Spectrogram
The room becomes the scale: people stand along a line according to their position on a real question, hear voices from different points, then the line folds — bringing the most…
Future~Present
Small groups gather at an imagined campfire 15–30 years ahead: "elders" recount to "youths" how the work fully succeeded, describing that world as if present, then all look "bac…
Generative Relationships STAR
Working groups assess their own interaction pattern on the STAR compass — Separateness (diversity of perspective), Tuning (listening and reflecting), Action (joint activity), an…
Grief Walking
A structured way for a community to accompany loss or hard transition: people move between four stations — each holding a different mode of being with grief (solitude, witnessin…
Heard, Seen, Respected
In pairs, participants take turns telling a story about a time they were NOT heard, seen, or respected, while the partner listens without interrupting, fixing, or judging. A str…
Helping Heuristics
Trios practice four escalating patterns of help in rapid rounds: quiet presence, guided questioning, giving advice, and coaching-style inquiry — with a client, a helper, and an…
Impromptu Networking
Three rapid rounds of paired conversation (4–5 minutes each) on two questions: "what big challenge do you bring?" and "what do you hope to give and get?" Participants mill and r…
Improv Prototyping
Groups act out a chronic challenge scene three ways — the dysfunctional version, an improved version, and wild variants — with player groups performing while observer groups har…
Integrated ~ Autonomy
For the perennial center-versus-local tension: groups examine where their organization needs standardization and where local autonomy creates value, then design "both-and" moves…
Mad Tea and Calm Tea
Two concentric circles face each other; the facilitator fires open sentence-stems ("what I appreciate in this situation is…", "a next step for me is…") and pairs complete them f…
Min Specs
Groups draft the maximum list of dos and don'ts for a purpose, then ruthlessly test each item: "if we broke this rule, could we still achieve the purpose?" Everything that survi…
Network Relationship Patterns
Quartets use a shared vocabulary of ten recurring work-relationship patterns to name how they actually interact — where energy flows, where it drains — and pick one pattern to s…
9 Whys
Pairs interview each other about their work on a shared challenge, asking "why is that important to you?" again and again — up to nine times — until the answer reaches bedrock p…
1-2-4-All
A participation structure that lets everyone contribute to a question in ~12–20 minutes: one minute of silent reflection alone, two minutes in pairs, four minutes in foursomes,…
Options Place
A meeting without a preset agenda: participants post the topics they care about on a breakout board, sessions run in parallel stations, and people move freely to wherever they c…
Panarchy
Groups map how their challenge lives at multiple embedded system levels — individual, team, organization, sector, society — and where change at one level enables or blocks chang…
Positive Gossip
Pairs "gossip" about colleagues — strictly positively: telling stories of what someone did well, as if the person weren't listening. Rounds rotate so everyone gossips and is gos…
Principles Walk-Around
The ten Liberating Structures principles — or a group's own espoused principles — are posted around the room; people walk, stand by one, and examine honestly where daily habits…
Purpose-To-Practice (P2P)
A design session for anything meant to last: the group works through five elements in order — Purpose (why the work matters to those affected), Principles (must-dos and must-not…
Shift & Share
A gallery of live demonstrations: innovators set up stations, small groups rotate through on a fixed rhythm, hear a short show-and-tell, and probe with questions. Spreads good i…
Simple Ethnography
Go where the users are: observers spend real time in the field — alone or in pairs — silently watching and recording what people actually do (not what they say they do), then de…
Social Network Webbing
The group maps its informal web: who is already involved in the purpose, who is connected to whom, and who is missing — using color-coded sticky notes that grow into a living ne…
Spiral Journal
A quiet opener: each person draws a spiral and, guided by four prompts read slowly aloud, writes brief reflections into its quadrants — arriving, noticing, remembering, intendin…
Strategy Knotworking (SKW)
A whole strategy process as one composed arc (~6 hours, or split over days): the group works through six questions — purpose, honest baseline, shifting context, competing challe…
Talking with Pixies
A playful externalization of competing inner voices: in quartets, one person describes a stalled ambition while two others voice the "pixies" — contrasting inner voices, one urg…
Troika Consulting
Peer consulting in trios, ~10 minutes per person: the client shares a challenge and question, turns their back (or turns off video), and listens while the two consultants genera…
User Experience Fishbowl
A small inner circle of people with direct lived experience of something talk candidly among themselves — not presenting, conversing — while the larger community listens from an…
What I Need From You (WINFY)
Functions or teams that depend on each other each formulate their top needs from the others as crisp requests. Spokespeople exchange them in a public circle — and answer only "y…
What, So What, Now What? (W³)
A debrief ladder in three deliberate rungs: first only facts and observations (What?), then meaning, patterns and implications (So What?), and only then action (Now What?). Smal…
Wicked Questions
Groups articulate the paradoxes they must live with rather than solve, in the template "How is it that we are ___ and we are ___ simultaneously?" Naming both poles as true at on…
Wise Crowds
Peer consultation at any scale: a client presents a challenge and question, answers clarifying questions, then turns away while their consultants — a quartet or a whole ringed r…