Oh AI, Do You Want to Be My Liberating Structures Coach?

Unfinished, unstructured and clear as mud…

Image of mudflats with sky reflected in the puddles.

A group of my LS pals gathered online this week to ponder the role of AI in our Liberating Structures (LS) practices. It was sparked by an experiment by a professor (For details, look here) to design a student experience using LS. The gist was, can AI (in this case, ChatGPT) help us design the gatherings we are creating.  In LS parlance, this would be to suggest a “string,” a series of LS.)  Can AI coach us to make the widespread use of LS across many (all?) contexts. Will this make it easy and enable less experienced users to successfully use LS? In other words, can AI be my LS coach? Keith McCandless wrote up his thoughts here.

Liberating Structures, for those new to my blog, are simple structures to unleash and engage participants. Read more here. They have become central to my practice, so yes, I obsess about them. A lot!

Using AI for LS Onboarding & Leveling Up

My experience teaching and coaching LS is that onboarding and use of 30-60% of the structures is pretty darn easy, painless and can be done by following the instructions, or by a direct experience of a structure led by someone else. Then you can dive in. I think AI would be icing on the cake for basic application IF one knew useful prompts for the LLM (Large Language Model – the thing that sits underneath tools like ChatGPT. And perhaps the cake is rich enough to be eaten plain. 

But is there something more? I wanted to begin to explore HOW we might use AI and develop some min specs of WHEN we would benefit from using AI. Of course, with a little side dish of the risks and rewards. 

The next level of LS practice is stringing structures into a coherent flow of a meeting or gathering agenda and being ready to switch to different LS as things emerge. This ability to work in complex and emergent contexts is a key value of LS so learning how to do that seems useful.

This level of practice starts with some of the basics of good meeting practices, mainly having a PURPOSE to start with. Without a clear purpose, or at least full awareness of that lack of clarity, we can fall into the trap of doing a structure to just, well, DO a structure. In experimenting with ChatGPT, I could give it a simple purpose and it would generate a fairly basic structure. In the limited number of trials I did, the AI gave me a pretty stable set of structures that I would consider the “easier to learn” type. So this type of suggestion might be inspiration for a new practitioner or give some sense of confidence. Most folks don’t need much more coaching for this level of application. It may also lead to MISSING out on other, less mentioned structures.  My few experiments did not provide much opportunity for leveling up.

On the downside, vague prompts produce vague and sometimes downright awful results. So being skilled at prompts, or having access to a library of fairly basic prompts that can be customized by context seems essential. 

Next we have a still limited LS related dataset in the current versions of tools like ChatGPT. Yes, we expect this to evolve and improve. But reliability is an issue. What happens when bad examples and data populates the corpus of data? What are the risks of “bad” advice (bias, baseline data, response to poorly worded prompts)?

When you circle back to get sources to the suggestions offered by ChatGPT, you can get garbage. I was offered imaginary papers by people I knew. I asked them, “did you write this paper?” No, they didn’t. We need our crap detectors!

For transcripts of some of my experiments see here and here, a ChatGPT composed musical (yeah, not related),  and an attempt at a prompt template Keith McCandless and I were playing with. 

Using AI to Spread Liberating Structures

If one had access to this AI coach, would it increase the adoption of LS?  I can imagine a world where it could increase adoption if there were some sort of front end that could help users develop useful prompts, point them to supplemental/complementary resources and hook them up with other practitioners. For simple stringing, once we have a good database, it could be really handy. 

I do not have enough imagination to figure out how I would measure this. My experience and intuition tell me that some people would find this an ideal way of learning and using LS. They just want to get a good result from their meeting and aren’t looking to be deep LS practitioners. Or at least, not yet. (It can suck you in!) So I can imagine this is a useful area of exploration.

So, risks?

The downside of learning LS via an AI may not be much more than the downside of “read and run” any particular LS. You might get ok, good, or even better results on your own. But I’d bet some good chocolate that the range of results would trend towards better if one practiced LS with other LS practitioners. It’s good social learning practice!

That said, I think there are some specific risks. For example:

  • The newer you are to LS, the less chance you will be good at writing useful prompts to learn and string LSs.  
  • One could learn a very limited set of LS which may serve OK, but miss the deeper and broader potential of a fuller LS practice. 
  • The data for LS stuff is still limited, narrowing the diversity of depth of LLM responses.
  • The tools like ChatGPT still generate garbage. How would a new (or even experienced) practitioner know what is garbage? Our crap-detectors are not always well functioning!
  • Tech dinosaurs and people who have neurodivergent experiences may not find current iterations of LLMs useful. 
  • As a practitioner, if one always works alone and never sees how other people use LS, it would be a loss. There is HUGE value in the LS network and communities that could be lost if one just focuses on what an LLM generates.  Yes, just my opinion!

OK, your turn. What have you experimented with in terms of LS and AI? Your thoughts, ideas and suggestions?

Barry Overeem’s “Drawing Together” Insights

I know, four months with nary a post and this is just a quick visit. If you are a champion for visual practices, Liberating Structures and collective sense making, take a peek at Barry Overeem’s wonderful post about the Liberating Structure, Drawing Together. I particularly appreciate his emphasis on the TOGETHER bit, because this LS can often be relegated to an individual activity.

https://medium.com/the-liberators/my-experience-with-the-liberating-structure-drawing-together-ee27d754263f

https://medium.com/the-liberators/my-experience-with-the-liberating-structure-drawing-together-ee27d754263f

Come on and Ecocycle Yourself!

One of my very treasured Liberating Structures is Ecocycle Planning. (I write about it a lot!) For quite a long time it baffled me entirely. Now it is indispensable to me to help suss out what to do in complex contexts. Some may even accuse me of finding any excuse to use it! 🙂

Lee Gimple, of the DC LS Community, invited me to do a session for them in January 2023 and I decided to offer a hands on exploration of Ecocycle by inviting everyone to ecocycle some aspect of their own life – personal, business, whatever. If you are interested in a bit of a different way of exploring ecocycle, you can sign up here. January 11, 2023 6:00-7:30 PM ET/4:30 PST and really really late for Europe. Mighty fine for the Antipodes!

P.S. The DC group has an email list too.

Close up of a garter snake curled up with its red tongue poking out atop rocks on a beach.
I was hoping this beautiful garter snake would curl into the infinity sign, just for this post, but they did not. Be they are so beautiful, they still made the cut!

Remembering Tim Jaasko-Fisher

I’ve been a part of the wide-ranging and many-noded Liberating Structures network for many years. It has connected me to many remarkable people. One of them was the amazing Tim Jaasko-Fisher. LS founder Keith McCandless introduced me to Tim (I can’t remember where) and later recommended me for some support Tim was looking for.

Tim (left) and Keith in a Liberating Structures immersion “Fish Bowl”

Right away I was taken by Tim. A lawyer by training and a dedicated advocate for child welfare by practice and passion, Tim showed me a whole new side of the legal profession. To watch him deftly weave networks, facilitate groups who were not necessarily all on the same side, nor interested in group process Tim was offering, was quite something. Tim embraced the wicked questions inside of all of us and inside himself. Sure of his way and open to other ways. Fierce advocate for kids and collaborator within a challenged child welfare system. Open to simple solutions like protein before family court hearings to keep everyone on an even keel, an approach he and his amazing wife, Dr. Kristin Allott. Even from a distance it was clear this was a remarkable partnership and Tim glowed when he introduced me to Kris.

I had the joy and pleasure to work a few times for and with Tim. They were always learning moments. To see how he viewed something and approached it opened new perspectives for my own practice. I am ever grateful.

I will miss Tim. We all will miss Tim. The world has a hole it in left by Tim.

An Overview & Example of Ecocycyle From 2019

I was cleaning up my Zoom recordings and came across this session from 2019 we set up as a follow up from a F2F Liberating Structures (LS) immersion in Atlanta. We didn’t have enough time to immerse ourselves in one of my favorite LS, Ecocycle. The wonderful kemmy Raji volunteered to use her own use of Ecocycle as a living case study. Please note we were still using the term “poverty trap” which is problemmatic language. We now say “scarcity trap.” We have a lot of work to do to make our language more anti-racist.

So here ya go. (Slides here.)