Series
Liberating Structures: Alignment & Relating
A twelve-part series applying the Liberating Structures built for building trust and shared understanding across a group — Impromptu Networking, Conversation Cafe, Heard Seen Respected, Fishbowl, What I Need From You, and Mad Tea — to feature-development workshops across a CRM, an AI-native QA tool, an HR leave tool, a Shopify storefront theme, and a Shopify-embedded LMS.
12 parts · first published
- 01
Impromptu Networking: Fifteen Minutes That Fixed a Twenty-Person Kickoff
A two-way email sync kickoff had twenty people in the room and about six of them talking. Three rounds of five-minute pairs on one repeated question got every voice into the project before the first slide.
·5 min read - 02
Impromptu Networking Over Video: Connecting Two Teams Who'd Never Met
An in-house LMS team and four contract integration engineers were about to build cohort scheduling together, having never spoken. Three rounds of two-person breakout rooms did in twelve minutes what a month of standups wouldn't have.
·5 min read - 03
Conversation Cafe: Sitting With Bad News Before Trying to Fix It
We shipped a test generator that wrote four hundred wrong assertions into customer repos. The instinct was an action plan by lunch. What the team needed first was a talking piece and four rounds of nobody being allowed to interrupt.
·4 min read - 04
Conversation Cafe: What to Do With a Decision the Team Didn't Get to Make
Leave Balance was moving to per-employee pricing and the decision was final. The support team would absorb the fallout either way — so we gave them ninety minutes to think out loud about it before the emails went out.
·5 min read - 05
Heard Seen Respected: The Retro That Had to Happen Before the Retro
A theme update wiped custom CSS for two hundred merchants, and support had warned us it would. Before anyone could talk process, the two teams needed a structure where the only permitted response to a story was silence.
·5 min read - 06
Heard Seen Respected: Repairing a Handoff Nobody Wanted to Talk About
Two designers had spent a quarter watching their work get reinterpreted in code with no conversation, and had gone quiet about it. Twenty minutes of paired listening — where the only allowed response is silence — got the conversation started.
·5 min read - 07
Fishbowl: Letting the Whole Team Overhear the Argument
Four people had been fighting about half-day accrual rounding in a private thread for months. Putting them in a circle with fifteen colleagues silently listening around them ended the argument in fifty minutes.
·5 min read - 08
Fishbowl: When Engineering Needs to Hear Sales Calls Without Being in Them
Every enterprise deal was stalling on self-hosted test runners, and engineering thought sales was inventing the requirement. Putting two account executives, a solutions engineer, and the head of sales in a circle — with engineering listening — settled it in half an hour.
·5 min read - 09
What I Need From You: Four Functions, Two Asks Each, One-Word Answers
Launching live cohort sessions needed four teams to depend on each other, and every dependency lived in someone's head as an assumption. WINFY forces the ask into the open — and permits exactly four replies.
·5 min read - 10
What I Need From You: A Submission Deadline and Nowhere Left to Hide
Nine days from a theme-store submission cutoff, four functions were each waiting on the other three. Banning every answer except yes, no, I'll try, and it's unclear got us to a real plan in thirty-five minutes.
·5 min read - 11
Mad Tea: Reading the Room in Twelve Minutes Flat
Before committing a quarter to a mobile rewrite, I wanted to know what the team actually thought — not what they'd say in a planning meeting. Nine sentence stems, thirty seconds each, two moving circles.
·5 min read - 12
Mad Tea: Nine Sentence Stems Before a Migration Nobody Wanted to Question
Moving every customer onto the new test-runner infrastructure had been decided months earlier and reviewed to death. Twelve minutes of rotating pairs found the two things the review had missed.
·5 min read