Activity
Liberating Structures, Ongoing engagement
Critical Uncertainties

Autumm Caines

Maha Bali
Engage everyone in making sense of profound challenges. Use to address difficult or confusing topics.
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Develop strategies for operating in a range of plausible yet unpredictable futures (as described in http://www.liberatingstructures.com/30-critical-uncertainties/).
Please note that the video above was developed for a summer 2020 professional development activity called DigPINS – it was not created for this particular resource, so there is mention of a synchronous session and things to sign up for – this was part of the summer 2020 course.
According to liberatingstructures.com, “you can help a diverse group quickly test the viability of current strategies and build its capacity to respond quickly to future challenges. This Liberating Structure prepares a group for strategy making. It does not produce a plan to be implemented as designed but rather builds resilience: the capacity to actively shape the system and be prepared to respond to surprise. This means being better able to see different futures unfolding, better prepared to act in a distributed fashion, and more ready to absorb disruptions resiliently.”
Spaces for participants to list uncertainties and create axis to explore quadrants.
The below is text adapted for virtual use, taking text mostly from the original description here: http://www.liberatingstructures.com/30-critical-uncertainties/
Synchronously, this could take up to two hours. With asynchronous components, you could take more time to reflect asynchronously, and the synchronous session can be 45 minutes, or so, in breakout rooms, before regrouping.
It is meant to be fully synchronous, but in the video above, it is divided up into synchronous and asynchronous components. You can pair up some steps with other Liberating Structures such as ‘wicked questions’ for the axes of uncertainty.
You can choose to have all groups use the same two axes, or you can allow (as we did) different groups to focus on different axes that they choose together.
Some space for discussing different uncertainties that we care about (like a Google Doc) and some way for people to vote for ones.
Some space for collaborative visualization like Google Slides.
Breakout rooms to work in small groups.
Critical Uncertainties as described on the Liberating Structures website: http://www.liberatingstructures.com/30-critical-uncertainties/.
This activity is one of a series of activities from Equity Unbound, focused on equitable online community building.
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