Bookstore
In addition to perusing this website, there are items you can purchase or download to advance your use of Liberating Structures. First among them is the book.
Instant preview ::: Click here
Buy on Amazon The color paperback ($49.95 USD) , black&white ($19.95 USD) and e-book are now available on the Amazon website. They offer free shipping to some customers.
Publication Date: Feb 19 2014 ISBN/EAN13: 0615893376 / 9780615893372
Preview the book here with one click.
Praise for the book:
This book is so needed and so useful. The authors understand that the world is changed through small, elegant shifts in the protocols of how we meet, plan, conference, and relate to each other. The genius of this book is how it puts in the hands of every leader and every citizen the facilitative power that was once reserved for the trained expert. This will be a required text for all programs on leadership and change.
Peter Block – Bestselling author of Flawless Consulting, Stewardship, and Community: The Structure of Belonging
A treasure trove of simple, practical methods to stimulate critical conversations and liberate the full potential of any group, from the frontline to the C-suite.
Cheryl M Scott – Global Programs Senior Advisor, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation
The book has been translated into French, Dutch, German, and Chinese languages. More translations in progress. Inquire with keith@liberatingstructures.com
Additional bookstore items:
The development team at Holisticon is happy to announce that version 3.6.0 of the Liberating Structures App is now released and available in the Google Play and Apple App Stores. A deep bow to their creative genius. Happy downloading!
Google Play
Apple / iOS
Design Cards
Design Cards make designing with LS together simple, visable, and engaging. Holisticon is offering a new 2023 Extended Edition card deck here. Eleven new LS in development are included.
LS Design Cards and the LS Selection Matchmaker in play for stringing in Denmark of Do It Yourself LS cards. It is a gift for you. Fred is a consultant liberating Business and IT Teams with Agile approaches and Participatory Leadership. Here is a file LS Cards 5th Edition that you can download. Open the PDF file and set your printer to 6 or 9 cards per page. I like 9. Use a heavy stock paper. Cut them apart and voila! You have a DIY set of LS Design Cards
Every person can make contributions by arranging novel sequences with cards. The cards serve as a kind of shorthand. We often use 1-2-4-All to generate many design strings simultaneously. Sifting and sorting is simplified.
The Liberators in Amsterdam are making the Holiston LS Design Cards easy to order from Europe. Order cards here.
Design Cards developed by Holisticon.
Praise for the book:
Liberating Structures will forever change the way we look at collaboration, learning and leadership by showing us how structures are critical in the world of work. Simply put, this book is for every leader who wants innovative but proven methods to transform his or her organization and engage its members in that journey of discovery.
Pat Witherspoon – Dean, College of Liberal Arts, The University of Texas at El Paso
As a Wall Street Journal columnist covering executive leadership, I discovered Lipmanowicz and McCandless in the early days of their work with Liberating Structures. Today, as an entrepreneur in a complex industry, I use those practices routinely. Any group, anywhere is inherently poised for rapid transformation. Liberating Structures make it simple to turn this potential into reality.
Thomas Petzinger Jr. – Founder of five life science companies and former Wall Street Journal "Front Lines" columnist
Pan, the Greek god of nature, evokes an image of unpredictable and surprising change. Liberating Structures routinely generate happy surprises.
The authors have drawn on pioneers in complexity science research, making insights immediately useful for people in the field. Liberating Structures invite frontline ownership of challenges by engaging everyone in a way that encourages them to become part of the solution and take action.
Brenda Zimmerman – Associate Professor of Strategy/Policy , Schulich School of Business, Toronto
Liberating Structures have given me not only many powerful new ways for engaging employees and customers; they have also succeeded beyond my imagination in providing endless new approaches to improve productivity and creativity, all in a fun and enjoyable way!
Guy Eiferman – President, Healthcare Services & Solutions, Merck & Co
Billings Clinic has been using many Liberating Structures for a decade. The engagement and emergence of new and stronger teams that include staff, leaders, physicians and nurses has helped us to improve patient experience and safety while reducing costs in an extremely complex healthcare environment. Highly recommended.
Nicholas Wolter, MD – CEO, Billings Clinic
Bringing Liberating Structures into my work is restoring my soul. Thank you.
Deb Witzel – Executive Director, Longmont Community Justice Partnership
Being able to manage interactions with Liberating Structures helps me be more self-confident and a better leader in the eyes of my team and my customers. Being an early adopter increased my influence in the organization and is one of the reasons I'm now a member of the senior management team. Liberating Structures helped me grow in my career.
Vanessa Vertiz – Business Unit Director, Lima, Peru
For the past eight years in Latin America and Italy Liberating Structures has helped me and my teams work through a wide range of issues. They became a way of doing business and to move organizations and people to new heights.
David Raimondo General Manager Latin America, Coopervision
There are those rare but delicious moments when you stumble across a resource that transforms everything. Liberating Structures have provided a delightfully rich repertoire of methods that live up to their bold name—liberating participants to engage, collaborate and reach into their collective wisdom to address their concerns and goals. And not just for my practice, but increasingly as fruitful tools for managers and staff across the Yukon Government organization.
Barrett W. Horne – OD Consultant with the Yukon Government, Canada
A must-read guide to transform how you engage others. Liberating Structures offer elegant approaches to get the most out of every discussion, meeting or workshop. Our NGO uses them internally and with our partners around the world. From Tanzania to NYC, from St. Lucia to Liberia, I have been amazed watching Liberating Structures unleash the potential of each gathering.
Sean Southey – Executive Director, PCI Media Impact
Holy smoke: www.liberatingstructures.com might be one of the most useful websites I've been introduced to since Google. The only words that come to mind are swear words, and I'm on county email.
Ryan Murrey – Acting Executive, Washington State CASA
[A] new framework for effective collaboration and interaction. …“Liberating Structures” can enable practitioners to do everything from keeping employees engaged in large-scale discussions to eliciting full-sentence answers from normally taciturn teenagers. ... Readers who implement the book’s techniques for managing conversations and guiding them to productive outcomes will add a useful tool to their managerial repertoires.
An actionable guide to productive group management that embraces and expands upon popular concepts of effective business leadership and teaches readers to derive maximum value from well-structured conversations.
Kirkus Reviews
Here are a few details about the book.
Smart leaders know that they would greatly increase productivity and innovation if only they could get everyone fully engaged. The challenge is how. Liberating Structures are novel, practical and no-nonsense methods to help you accomplish this goal with groups of any size.
A curious reader looking over the proofPrepare to be surprised by how simple and easy they are for anyone to use. Whether you are a leader, facilitator, changemaker, or part of any group of people who want to be more innovative, adaptive, and quick off the mark to achieve better results, this book shows you how with detailed descriptions of each of the 33 Liberating Structures plus tips on how to get started and traps to avoid.
We assembled this collection of Liberating Structures by tapping great ideas in the public domain, simplifying them, and adding a few of our own. Our purpose is to make all of the structures accessible for use by anyone from the frontline to the top of any organization or initiative.
Part One: The Hidden Structure of Engagement will ground you with the conceptual framework and vocabulary of Liberating Structures. We contrast Liberating Structures with conventional patterns and show the benefits of using them to transform the way people collaborate, learn, and discover solutions together.
Part Two: Getting Started and Beyond offers guidelines for experimenting with Liberating Structures and learning from your experience in a range of possible applications from small group interactions to system-wide change initiatives.
Part Three: Stories from the Field is a collection of real-life case examples provided by people who have used Liberating Structures around the world. Their stories unfold in all types of organizations, from healthcare to academic to military to global business enterprises, from local judicial and legislative systems to national and international R&D efforts.
In Part Four: The Field Guide for Including, Engaging, and Unleashing Everyone, we give you a repertoire of thirty-three Liberating Structures. In describing how to use each Liberating Structure, we provide a step-by-step explanation of what to do and what to expect.
Discover today what Liberating Structures can do for you and those around you without expensive investments, complicated training, or restructuring. Liberate everyone’s contributions - all it takes is the determination to experiment.
To be prepared against surprise is to be trained. To be prepared for surprise is to be educated. James P. Carse
Handy tabs added to the Field Guide by Magda Kaspary.
Typically we advance by adding new facts and tools to existing knowledge. While this book offers fresh methods, the big contribution comes from a novel way to organize with existing knowledge. The result is surprisingly powerful.
Familiar dull things like meetings, projects, evaluation, and strategy suddenly become lively and full of possibility.
