exercise · all tools
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 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.
- 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
Instructions
- Where
- liberatingstructures.com/ecocycle-planning — Liberating Structures, open
- Availability
- Open online — published at the link, free to read
- Licence
- CC BY-SA 4.0
Source link checked 29 Aug 2026 — unchanged since we recorded it on 28 Aug 2026
This directory describes and points home; the instructions stay with the people who made them.
Origin
Henri Lipmanowicz & Keith McCandless (ecocycle model: Brenda Zimmerman & David Hurst) — Liberating Structures / ecological systems thinking
In this directory via Liberating Structures
status: checked · added 2026-08-25