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?

Spreading Liberating Structures: Exposure AND Practice

Community Room signage at the La Conner Swinomish Library in English and Lushootseed.

I hung out yesterday with Keith McCandless, Stefan Morales and his team along with a cohort of new Liberating Structures (LS) users. The highlight of our hour together was the New Users Fishbowl, where we heard about the good, the bad, the ugly and the lovely of three folks using their new LS learning. One person, working in the the jungles of Costa Rica, had never facilitated. This was her first facilitation training! She just grabbed on to a handful of structures, crafted her agenda or “string,” and successfully led her meeting. And got results! Just do it! Just PRACTICE! (Oh, I would love to share the video of her telling the story. Maybe that can happen! Maybe I can follow up and interview her!)

Yes, and…

When I shared my GOOD and LOVELY of LS, I spoke about the social container, the community, that holds the LS practice as it is used and evolves. I’m committed to the idea that using LS happens in the context of social learning, in social learning spaces; learning with and from each other, and making sense as we practice together. (Side note: See Bev and Etienne Wenger-Trayner et. al.’s new Communities of Practice Guidebook. )

Keith, as one of the LS co-founders, is deeply committed to its spread. That commitment is reflected in the care with which he and his co-founder, Henri Lipmanowicz crafted the instructions for each structure so that anyone could read, pick it up and run with it. The idea that this is so simple and clear as expressed in writing, you are ready. I am less sanguine about that (sorry, Keith!)

For the of auto-didacts and the intrinsically or experientially confident, this works. For the rest of us, there is much that comes between the idea that “hey, this is cool and will improve our group interactions and work” and actually DOING it. Doing it in the face of being a new-bee. Doing it in the face of those who resist how LS distributes power to everyone in the room. Doing it in the (mistake) belief that if I don’t do this perfectly this will be a disaster. (A.k.a, looking foolish, or learning while failing forward!) Doing it before we have internalized our own sense of agency to use the structures. Believing before seeing.

When we try together; practice together; debrief together after practicing alone, the value of our LS work becomes visible. We hold both our “beginners mind” and our “seasoned practitioner” experience hand in hand. We benefit from the multiple perspectives of our fellow practitioners — “you did WHAT? WAAAY COOL!” In Stefan’s workshop, even the new-bee is encouraged. Again, drawing on Bev and Etienne and their book, Learning to Make a Difference, comes this idea of identity as a source of agency.

…have learned or internalized that they can’t make a difference³ or that the chances of success are so low it’s not worth trying. The risks may outweigh even the effort of imagining possible benefits. People from vulnerable social groups are often disenfranchised from resources and some have adapted their expectations to align with the status quo.” And many participants are likely to fall somewhere in between. Learning to make a difference often has to start with developing an identity from which to envision the possibility of making a difference.

Even if participants have a foundation of confidence to consider trying to make a difference, we are not assuming that this is a simple, straight- forward intention – that caring to make a difference is free of ambivalence, tensions, or contradictions. For instance, there may be a disturbing gap between what an organization expects and what participants think is important. There may also be disagreements among participants. When caring to make a difference is viewed as part of the lived experience of people, it inherits all the complexity and forces of the social world in which people are embedded. Learning to make a difference brings this complexity into focus: it includes learning to navigate external demands, contradictions, tensions, and ambivalence.

Learning to Make a Difference Etienne Wenger-Trayner and Beverly Wenger-Trayner

The spread of a Liberating Structures practice is the dance between exposure to the content and the practice using LS. It is, to use the Wenger-Trayner’s words, “developing an identity from which to envision the possibility of making a difference.”

Liberating Structures aspire to be of use to those making a difference. The container for this aspiration, for the spread of LS, of this social learning, is the community of LS practitioners. LS is great stuff. It’s practitioners are an amazing, diverse collection of co-learners. AND, LS needs it’s various social learning spaces to spread far, wide, lovingly, and successfully.

Jon Lebkowsky, Scoop Sweeny & I Ponder Online Community 

If you need something in your ears for an hour, us geezers pontificated last week. It was fun. There are a few people I quoted without attribution and I need to go find those sources of inspiration. I think Patti Digh pointed to someone who wrote about un-developing. That’s the one I want to find. I hope I was not too cynical…

Nancy White: Life Online

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

Holiday Missives With AI Help…

…a rare and unique holiday letter from Nancy and Larry White

Larry White, Grandperson 2, Nancy White and Grandperson 1 sitting on couch in striped holiday PJs.
Grandparents and their grandpeople in holiday striped PJs…

I’m not sure this will ever get sent. I’m not sure where I have viable snail mail addresses to so many of you, so it may also end up as a blog post. (Yup, just became a blog post!)

I realize I SOOO enjoy getting cards and letters from many of you. (Well, fewer and fewer every year because like, why send a card to someone who never responds, right?) So it is time to repay the favor.

Wait, there is a hitch. I am trying a new AI-Assisted writing tool called LEX and I thought I’d let it enhance your reading experience. So what you are about to read in italics probably isn’t true! But it may give you a bit of entertainment.

I have moved around a bit since I last had a “normal” address. Larry and I got married in 2014 and we moved to his place in the woods outside Eugene, Oregon. In 2016 we decided to leave the US due to rising political tensions (Larry is Canadian) and we spent 10 months in New Zealand. We really liked it there, and we had every intention of making it our permanent home. But alas, the best laid plans… (LEX got this ALL wrong. But I like the idea of New Zealand!)

We are also more than full time grandparents. Our two grand people, Staley and Byrne, live with us Sunday nights through Fridays. Our two adults sons, Chris and Alex, live in Seattle. They clearly did not inherit their mother’s wandering genes. …

Life has been a bit unusual lately. In September, we took in a Syrian refugee family. It has been interesting, to say the least. We are definitely not in Kansas anymore, Toto. The kids are great, but their parents are struggling to adjust to small town living in the US. And we are struggling to help them while still maintaining some semblance of our own lives. But it is all good, and we are all learning a lot. (Again, LEX has quite the imagination.)

We continue to deeply love and enjoy our little cabin on Skagit Bay. Living on an island (Fidalgo) is pretty great, especially one you can get on and off of via bridges. No ferries for us! I spend a lot of time in our garden up there, growing food that mostly gets snacked on by the wildlife. Our garden in Seattle has suffered in comparison.

The biggest personal news is I have semi-rewired. In other words, I’m barely doing paid client work, but still keep connected and practicing facilitation and group process, but mostly just for old clients/friends or pro-bono. Most of the latter is lazy, coaching stuff. I let others do all the heavy lifting.

I’m really enjoying this slower pace. I like having time to read, and to go on long walks with Larry and the dogs (we have two now… Maggie, the American Eskimo Dog shown in the picture, and Simon, a Shetland Sheepdog. They are both rescues, and they are both spoiled rotten.). (Nope, LEX, no dogs. I wonder if ChatGPT would have done a better job. Too bad their servers are overloaded. Non-geek friends, I apologize for this garbage!)

I also like having time to travel to see family and friends. We went to Vancouver Island in September to visit Byrne. (Hey LEX, Byrne has never been to Vancouver!)

I have picked back up my guitar and actually have calluses on my fingers! A couple of times I have been able to sing and play with Ellis, a friend of our friend Karen. I miss singing harmonies. My old bluegrass band, Nobody’s Bizness, was supposed to gather this year but, well… maybe 2023!

I also continue to read voraciously, both fiction and non-fiction. Currently I’m reading a book about North Korea and another about the history of medicine. (NOPE!)

Thank goodness our local public library makes e-books easy to get, so I can now start whittling down the piles of books that sit everywhere. I can. But will I?

So, that is enough about me. Please write and tell me about you. I would love to hear what is going on in your lives.

Happy holidays!

Love,

Nancy and Larry

Ping me if you want more family holiday pics! Holiday Fudge recipe here: https://fullcirc.com/2012/12/22/happy-holidays-and-make-some-great-fudge-candy/