5 Liberating Structures to Supercharge Your Scrum Teams

A Fresh Approach to Problem-Solving and Team Engagement

👋 Hello, I’m Vibhor, and welcome to the 🔒 subscriber-only edition 🔒 of my newsletter, the “Winning Strategy.” Every week, I answer one reader question about Agile Products / Processes, Role-based Skills, and anything else that you need answered about your Career Growth. You can send me your questions here.

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On to this week’s question!

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Q: Hello, Vibhor - BIG Thank you for sharing all the wonderful knowledge with us through your newsletters and videos. I would love to read a newsletter from you on an untouched yet powerful topic in the Agile world - "Liberating Structures." Specifically around how they are useful and how they could be tailored to our remote ways of working and probably top 5 ones out of the 33 that could be applied with remote teams to get most value out of them. Thank you!

Thanks for the question and the kind words!

For me, it’s always exciting to explore new and innovative ways to make the lives of our teams easier.

I first read the book, “The Surprising Power of Liberating Structures: Simple Rules to Unleash A Culture of Innovation” by Henri Lipmanowicz and Keith McCandless in Jan 2015.

And let me tell you, my first impression was quite underwhelming. The book is not an easy read.

I simply didn’t understand what these techniques were for and how can they be helpful in an Agile environment. This was mainly because of the language the authors used to write the book.

It took me well over 3 reads to understand the value the book was trying to provide, and then I was hooked.

Over the years, I have used several of these techniques with my teams in some way or form. Today, I will zoom in on 5 Liberating Structures that you can use to supercharge your Scrum teams.

These 5 are especially great for (but not limited to) remote Scrum teams. They can help you communicate better, solve problems together, and keep improving, even if your team members are miles apart.

Let’s get in and see how these structures can turn your remote interactions into exciting sessions.

But before we do that…What are Liberating Structures Anyway?