exercise · all tools
Ecocycle Planning
Depth · what it can open●○○○1 — informational
Holding · facilitation2 — facilitator
Trust · group readiness★any
Disclosure · what is sharednone
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 too long) or scarcity traps (starved too early). Borrowed from forest ecology: healthy systems need composting as much as growth. Ends with concrete decisions about what to stop, start, and tend.
Hold with care
- Placing a colleague's cherished project in 'creative destruction' is politically live — keep placement collective and criteria explicit
Practical
- Time
- 90 min
- Group
- 4–∞ · small-group, large-group
- Settings
- in-person, online
- Materials
- Wall ecocycle template; per-person copies; sticky notes
- Mechanisms
- systems-sensing, cognitive-reframing
- Change scope
- state · repeatable
Origin & where it lives
Henri Lipmanowicz & Keith McCandless (ecocycle model: Brenda Zimmerman & David Hurst) — Liberating Structures / ecological systems thinking
Instructions: open online · CC BY-SA 4.0
In this directory via Liberating Structures
status: checked · added 2026-08-25