Series
Liberating Structures: Ideation & Possibility
An eleven-part series applying the Liberating Structures built for generating options at scale — 1-2-4-All, TRIZ, Drawing Together, Open Space Technology, and 25/10 Crowd Sourcing — 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.
11 parts · first published
- 01
1-2-4-All: Fast Group Ideation for a New Pipeline Feature
The default workshop opener — silent thinking, then pairs, then fours, then the room — surfaces more usable ideas in twelve minutes than an hour of open discussion. Here's how it runs, and how I used it to kick off a pipeline-feature redesign without one voice dominating the room.
·6 min read - 02
1-2-4-All: Getting Everyone's Real Read on Course Completion
When 'why don't learners finish courses' gets asked in an open meeting, you get the three theories the loudest three people already believe. 1-2-4-All gets you the theories nobody had said out loud yet — including the one that turned out to be right.
·5 min read - 03
1-2-4-All: Untangling an Approval Workflow Nobody Agreed On
Managers, employees, and HR each experience a leave-approval workflow completely differently, and a normal discussion lets whichever group is in the room set the agenda for everyone. Here's how 1-2-4-All got three conflicting mental models onto the table before any of them could dominate.
·6 min read - 04
TRIZ: Designing the Perfect Way to Make Merchants Abandon Setup
Asking a team to improve onboarding gets you polite, incremental ideas. Asking them to deliberately guarantee merchants quit during setup gets you an unflinching list of every real anti-pattern already in the product — and a reverse of that list is your actual roadmap.
·6 min read - 05
TRIZ: Engineering a Course No One Would Ever Finish
The instructional designers already knew what made learners quit — they just weren't allowed to say it as long as the question was framed as 'how do we improve the course experience.' Flipping the question to 'how do we guarantee nobody finishes' let them stop being polite about their own curriculum.
·6 min read - 06
Drawing Together: What the Theme-Customization Journey Actually Looks Like
Ask a room to describe a merchant's customization journey in words and everyone nods along to a vague consensus. Ask them to draw it, silently and simultaneously, and you discover that half the room pictures a completely different shape of journey than the other half.
·7 min read - 07
Drawing Together: The Deal Handoff Sales and Support Each Thought Was Simple
Sales called the handoff to the account team 'basically automatic.' Support called it 'basically manual.' Both were describing the same feature. Drawing it out, silently and separately, was the only way to see that they weren't disagreeing about facts — they were describing two different halves of one broken process.
·6 min read - 08
Open Space Technology: Letting the Room Set Its Own Agenda for 'What Should the LMS Become'
A question as broad as 'what should the LMS become' doesn't fit an agenda anyone can write in advance. Open Space Technology throws out the agenda entirely and lets the people with real passion or real concern build the day's schedule themselves, in the room, on the morning of.
·7 min read - 09
Open Space Technology: What Sales, Support, and Product Actually Wanted to Talk About
Three functions with three different vocabularies and three different sets of frustrations rarely produce a good agenda when one person tries to plan it for all of them. Open Space Technology let each function propose its own topics — and the sessions that drew people from all three turned out to be the ones worth having.
·6 min read - 10
25/10 Crowd Sourcing: Ranking a Room Full of Instructor Feature Requests in Fifteen Minutes
A backlog of instructor feature requests, each championed loudly by whoever submitted it, is impossible to prioritize fairly in an open meeting. 25/10 Crowd Sourcing turns the whole room into anonymous judges and produces a ranked list before anyone's had a chance to lobby for their own idea.
·7 min read - 11
25/10 Crowd Sourcing: Merchants Ranked Their Own Theme Wishlist
Merchants submit theme-improvement requests constantly, and the ones that get built tend to be whichever ones a support ticket happened to escalate loudly. 25/10 Crowd Sourcing put merchants themselves in the room, generating and anonymously ranking their own wishlist — and the winner wasn't the request the team expected.
·6 min read