Culture is the word we use to sum up our experiences with a group.
Since each of us experiences different moments, and even when we share a moment, perceive and remember different things, the way we describe that culture can vary wildly. After nearly 20 years of book club/wine + gossip gatherings with neighboring ladies, I describe my neighborhood as close-knit and friendly. My husband calls it challenging. He wonders: how exactly do you navigate relationships when you know all the ladies on the block talk? My kids call it old.
The culture we believe in is the culture we experienced.
And yes. Well, duh. You know this.
Many groups miss the opportunity this hands them, though, and as a result, fail to connect the dots between the culture they say they want and the way they design their moments.
The folks in charge of an organization supply the definitions. What is the org meant to accomplish? What values and rules constrain how it gets done? Then, everyone collectively decides how to work towards those goals within those guidelines. Culture emerges from the mix.
It is possible for the culture they experience to feel a lot like the one described in the poster. But it's not easy, because this requires making culturally coherent choices at every level.
Everyone in my family has a different experience of the neighborhood. My husband sees the neighbors over the fence, and when they need help lifting heavy things. I drink wine with them at book club, ladies only. The kids have to walk blocks to find their friends. Mine just drive over. Our experiences are very different, except twice a year, at the summer picnic and the holiday party. These shared events mean that my kids recognize and can name all our neighbors; they know they belong to a neighborhood in a way those living on other, less connected streets do not.
Organizations get far more of these shared moments than a neighborhood does. They're called meetings.
Meetings give groups a high-volume, high-value setting for experience design. You can’t steer other people’s hallway conversations, and you can't make people read email. Meetings you can structure. Because they're the most frequently repeated way people experience each other at work, meeting design becomes the organization's highest-impact and most tractable culture-making tool.
The challenge: it's the C-suite's job to define what the culture should be. Then, it's the job of every department head, team leader, project leader, and meeting host to design meetings that make that culture real.
Better make sure those people have the skills!
On Sep 9 & 10, I'm co-hosting a Liberating Structures immersion in Portland, Oregon with Stephanie Fleming from the Viri Group. For two days, we'll experience, then examine, these go-to meeting engagement structures.
When you peel back all the layers of good meeting design, you'll find these structured interactions at the center. Beyond the 43 Liberating Structures, there are hundreds, maybe thousands, of defined ways to change up the dynamics of how groups think, feel, and act together during a meeting.
Meeting design layers. Each layer involves different kinds of design choices.
Most of our work with clients lives in the outer layers of that diagram. We help leaders clarify what the organization needs. We design the meeting flows that move projects and departments forward. We tune the systems that surround all of it. The innermost layer, the actual moment-to-moment interaction inside a meeting, we've mostly left to pre-defined templates and whoever's facilitating that day.
This immersion is us giving back. When we design moment-by-moment details, Liberating Structures is the toolkit we reach for most, because it's the most reliable and the most adaptable one we've found. We've built it into dozens of our agenda templates over the years, and featured a handful of structures in our online courses. If you're the one running or designing meetings, you should know how to use these tools on your own.
Liberating Structures earned that spot in my toolkit for a second reason, beyond how well the methods work. They're released under Creative Commons. Nobody has to license them, gatekeep them, or pay to use them. They're built to be handed off, built into anyone and everyone’s meeting, adapted, and taught forward. That openness is a value I share, and it shows up in how the methods themselves are designed. Ten principles guide every Liberating Structure: things like practicing deep respect for people and local solutions, amplifying freedom and responsibility together, never starting without clear purpose. This is a definition for healthy collaboration, and it's one I agree with. In the meetings and workshops I design, and with the clients I serve, this is the culture we're aiming for.
Each of the LS Principles and an associated figure created by Thea Schukken in partnership with The Liberators.
Most of the people who know and regularly use Liberating Structures call themselves facilitators. Many are Facilitators; people who make their living designing and leading workshops.
Our September event will feel familiar to any facilitators who join us, because experience-then-examine is how you learn this stuff. Group interaction is embodied. To really get how a method works, you have to feel what it's like to sit with a group in silence. You need to know which conversations fit in a 1- or 5- or 15-minute slot. You need to see what all this brings out in others: when they lean in, when they yawn, when they recoil. You want to know in your gut that you can trust your group (and your reputation) to a structure, because you had a worthwhile experience when someone shared it with you.
You want to know that the way you structure your meetings aligns with your intended culture. You need to believe that when your team interacts differently in meetings, you'll spend less time coping with the same problems and more time solving them.
I hope many facilitators join us, but even more, I hope to see the team, department, and project leads there. The Liberating Structures methods form the foundation of many business meeting designs. Once you know what to look for, you'll spot them in agile meetings, anything by EOS or Lencioni, and pretty much every HBR article about meetings. These are foundational, proven ways to structure interactions and create positive, meaningful experiences.
All the design decisions up-and-down the chain matter. They all have an impact. But when it comes to meetings, getting the structured interactions right is how you make your desired culture real.
Details and registration for our September 9-10, 2026 session here: luma.com/8nnlpz7o. You can learn more about Liberating Structures and find other learning events around the world at liberatingstructures.com.