In Min Specs, participants generate a list of all potential dos and don’ts for achieving a purpose and then reduce it to the absolute minimum requirements.
By eliminating nonessential rules (max specs), Min Specs gives groups more freedom and promotes responsibility. It can also help a group scale up innovations with fidelity. Following the rules makes it possible for the group to go wild!
This structure gives life to LS Principle #6, Amplify Freedom and Responsibility.
Any breakout group activity to capture ideas and generate dialogue around them.
Wise Crowds make it possible to instantly engage a small or large group of people in helping one another. You can set up a Wise Crowds consultation with one small group of four or five people or with many small groups simultaneously or, during a larger gathering, with a group as big as one hundred or more people. Individuals, referred to as “clients,” can ask for help and get it in a short time from all the other group members. Each individual consultation taps the expertise and inventiveness of everyone in the group simultaneously. Individuals gain more clarity and increase their capacity for self-correction and self-understanding. Wise Crowds develop people’s ability to ask for help. They deepen inquiry and consulting skills. Supportive relationships form very quickly. During a Wise Crowds session, the series of individual consultations makes the learning cumulative as each participant benefits not only from being a client but also from being a consultant several times in a row. Wise Crowds consultations make it easy to achieve transparency. Together, a group can outperform the expert!
Understanding and analyzing a piece of advice are important activities. Here is a game that requires the participants to analyze the features associated with different pieces of advice.
A method to capture notes and reflections in hybrid events
Instead of altering our beliefs to fit new information, we often force information to fit our existing beliefs.
W3 helps groups break this pattern by reflecting on a shared experience in a way that builds understanding and spurs coordinated action while avoiding unproductive conflict.
Progressing in stages makes this practical: collecting facts (What Happened), making sense of them (So What), and identifying what actions logically follow (Now What). Every voice is heard while simultaneously sifting for insights and shaping new direction.
The shared progression eliminates most of the misunderstandings that otherwise fuel disagreements about what to do — enlivening LS Principle #4, Learn by Failing Forward. Voila!
You can help a large group of people identify obstacles and opportunities for spreading ideas or innovations at many levels. Panarchy enables people to visualize how systems are embedded in systems and helps them understand how these interdependencies influence the spread of change. Participants become more alert to small changes that can help spread ideas up to other system levels; they learn how shifts at larger or lower system levels may release resources to assist them at another level. With better appreciation of the Ecocycle dynamics at play, the group creates “opportunity windows” for innovations to spread among levels and across boundaries.
One, Two, And More is a flexible structured sharing activity for exploring different topics using different sets of questions. A unique feature of this activity is answering each question in three different modes: individual, pairs, and in teams.
Help Me Understand is based on the underlying (and accurate) assumption is that employees come to meetings with widely different questions around a topic or a change. It also allows the players to discover overlaps with other players’ questions and to notice the frequency with which those questions occur—something they may not have known prior to the meeting.
