Series
Liberating Structures: Culture, Change & Adoption
A nine-part series applying the Liberating Structures built for spreading a new practice through an organization — Purpose-to-Practice, Shift & Share, Social Network Webbing, and Integrated~Autonomy — 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.
9 parts · first published
- 01
Purpose-to-Practice: Chartering a New Squad Without Writing a Charter Doc
We stood up a four-person squad to build Recap CRM's Founder Digest and nearly handed them a charter written by three people who weren't on it. Purpose-to-Practice made the squad write its own — and the purpose that came out wasn't the one in the deck.
·4 min read - 02
Purpose-to-Practice: When the Practices Step Kills the Purpose You Started With
Course Guru's cohort-courses initiative had a purpose everyone nodded at for ninety minutes. It survived until the group had to name what they'd actually do on Monday — and then it fell apart, which is exactly what Purpose-to-Practice is built to make happen early.
·4 min read - 03
Purpose-to-Practice: Giving a Guild Enough Structure to Survive Its Founder
Shortest's test-infrastructure guild ran entirely on one staff engineer's enthusiasm, which meant it would end when she went on leave. Purpose-to-Practice turned a volunteer habit into something with named decision rights — and the Structure step was where it stopped being a book club.
·4 min read - 04
Shift & Share: Five Theme Squads, Five Stations, No Slide Deck
Polo Themes had five squads solving the same storefront section problem five different ways, and a quarterly demo meeting nobody learned anything from. Shift & Share replaced the plenary with rotating stations — and the best pattern in the company came from the squad that would never have volunteered to present.
·4 min read - 05
Shift & Share: Spreading the Workarounds Before They Become Policy
Four Leave Balance support pods each had their own private ritual for surviving the year-end carryover run. Shift & Share put those rituals on four tables at once — and turned three undocumented workarounds into two product bugs and one feature.
·5 min read - 06
Social Network Webbing: The Adoption Map That Isn't the Org Chart
Six weeks after launching structured call notes in Recap CRM, adoption inside our own GTM org had stalled at 31%. Social Network Webbing found the reason on a sheet of butcher paper: the person everyone actually copied wasn't on any of our rollout lists.
·5 min read - 07
Social Network Webbing: Finding the Instructors Other Instructors Copy
Course Guru's completion-nudge feature had 400 instructors eligible and 26 using it. Webbing the instructor network — from the outside, with our own support team drawing — showed the practice was spreading through three Discord servers we didn't run.
·4 min read - 08
Integrated~Autonomy: Ending the Standardize-Then-Fragment Pendulum
Shortest had swung between one mandated test runner and squad-by-squad freedom twice in three years. Integrated~Autonomy refused to run the vote a third time and asked a different question: what would let us be more standardized and more autonomous at once?
·5 min read - 09
Integrated~Autonomy: One Accrual Engine, Eleven Countries, No Winner
Every country Leave Balance expanded into added exceptions to a core accrual engine that was supposed to be universal. The fix wasn't a bigger engine or eleven forks — it was ninety minutes spent refusing to choose between them.
·5 min read