Liberating Structures for Knowledge Sharing by Nancy White

  • 02/07/2014
  • 12:00 PM - 1:30 PM
  • Online using Adobe Connect

Registration

Have you experienced knowledge sharing as the conscription of ideas, or as the liberation of insights? If you are interested in the latter, plan to join this webinar to explore "Liberating Structures for Knowledge Sharing." We'll review the conceptual roots of Liberating Structures, practice one or two, then entertain your questions and ideas about how to use them.

The complexity thinker, David Snowden, famously says "we know more than we can say and we can say more than we write." In Nancy White's experience, this runs very true, and yet we continue to focus our "knowledge sharing" by building ill-used content repositories, while the most relevant and active knowledge sharing happens in the engagement between people. If we re-imagine many of our day-to-day interactions with Knowledge Sharing in mind, we can both "get stuff done" and share knowledge. Keith McCandless and Henri Lipmanowicz collected insights from their experience and from many facilitation approaches to identify interaction patterns that unleash us and engage us, calling them "Liberating Structures." (liberatingstructures.com) As Nancy reviewed Keith's work drafting up these structures, she recognized many of the patterns of successful engagement in her own 30+ years of work. And she vigorously expanded her own repertoire, particularly in the context of communities of practice and knowledge sharing. They are straightforward, easily adoptable and very adapatable. You might think of them as your handy dandy Swiss army knife of engagement. Participants will learn what "Liberating Structures" are, learn one or two liberating structures that work online, and engage in a lively conversation about liberating structures and their use.


As the founder of Full Circle Associates, Nancy White helps organizations connect through online and offline strategies.  Nancy is an online interaction designer, facilitator and coach for distributed communities of practice, online learning, distributed teams and online communities. She has a special interest in the NGO/NPO sector. Nancy blogs at http://www.fullcirc.com/ as well as teaches, presents and writes on online facilitation and interaction, social architecture and social media (http://www.fullcirc.com/community/communitymanual.htm). She is co-author with Etienne Wenger and John Smith of “Digital Habitats: stewarding technology for communities.” (http://www.technologyforcommunities.com).