Design Thinking: Learnings from Holding Space with Liberatory Leaders

This is the third article in NPQ’s series Liberatory Leadership.

Gertrude Stein famously observed, “There is no straight line in nature.” Though this might be arguable, it’s fair to say that nature routinely shows off her irregular, rounded, and perhaps softer designs.

In contrast, modern humans often prefer straight lines and sharp edges. We have created a world that needs designs to be predictable, easy to comprehend, and executable at scale—so much so that even nonstructural innovations like governance and leadership rely heavily on linear designs that are both helpful and hurtful.

Meanwhile, when we think of liberatory leadership, often what comes to mind are cumulus clouds, mountain ranges, wildflowers blooming in the desert, water flowing, and the messy, beautiful shape of humans. It’s purposeful that liberatory leadership is designed to address the sharp structures that have created our systems of oppression.

Liberatory leadership invites collective responsibility and action such as creating, refining, and uplifting life-giving policies, structures, and practices that combat oppression in our organizations and our communities. Leadership Learning Community’s (LLC) Liberatory Leadership Framework offers an ecosystem-sourced model for practicing leadership differently and supporting leaders who are navigating this complexity as they attempt to guide their communities toward liberation.

Designing Space for Collective Liberation

If you can’t imagine it, you can’t have it.

Toni Morrison

For 25 years, LLC has held space for leaders to learn together. As we accompanied leaders on expansive journeys, we have learned about social behaviors, observed field trends, and been inspired by dreams of possibilities. We have come to believe that leadership is a site of transformation, and in building deep trust in one another, we open up portals to a bright future that has only lived in fragments in our individual interior lives.

As such, at every retreat, webinar, community of practice, or learning community we facilitate, LLC invites leaders to live out the compelling vision of collective liberation: one that seeks power, joy, and thriving for all people. Below are three ways we design these spaces:

1. Just Work in Just and Joyous Ways

When we tend to each other in an interdependent way, we are at the molecular level of rebuilding.

Norma Wong on the long arc of change work

As mentioned in our previous article, “LLC is observing and experiencing tremendous leader burnout and exhaustion, and we anticipate more.” We believe that social good leaders are at the limits of our collective capacity to uphold the current nonprofit infrastructure. The outcomes of our work continue to be necessary and impactful, but how we do it must change. We cannot afford to create harm and trauma through insecure funding, hierarchical power struggles, and sharp weapons as our only strategy.

What can happen is a shift in perspective and practice. One example is how infrequently we give ourselves more than five minutes of grace. Imagine looking at your calendar and noting that a meeting is starting at 10:00 am. Your 9:00 am meeting was supposed to end at 9:50, but it’s running long. You don’t have time for a break, let alone a minute to adjust your eyesight away from the screen for some relief. You jump right into that next meeting a few minutes late. You feel behind and disruptive, and you apologize.

What if we gave each other and ourselves some grace here? Could we acknowledge that this is a well-known trap? As a facilitator, we can build in a grace period. We can find ways to bring people in when they arrive. We can practice the world we are seeking in the present.

At LLC, we set up a Zoom disclaimer in all of our meetings. Our disclaimer says: “As you join this meeting, we invite you to take a deep breath in and exhale. Please take your time arriving. If you need a bio break, a break from videos turned on, or even need to reschedule, we welcome you to share this with us.”

We do this in recognition of a habit of overscheduling and the urgency culture created by dashing from one meeting to another for hours straight. We are willing to take the risk of not meeting with you, if it means you get to practice your humanity with us. This supports a shift toward slowing down for purpose and acknowledges that even Zoom meetings have an innate harm to them if our overproduction culture goes unchecked.

We encourage you to use our language or create a disclaimer that reflects the values and shifts you seek in our virtual gathering culture. (And you can find technical instructions on how to add a disclaimer to your Zoom account here.)

We invite you to practice this pause now. Think of something joyful or satisfying. Now take a moment to breathe in joy and satisfaction. Take your time letting it in. Then, breathe out joy and satisfaction in knowing that they are fleeting feelings. You will meet them again whenever you choose to. Take another deep breath in 1, 2, 3, 4, hold 1, 2, 3, 4, and release 1, 2, 3, 4.

2. Trust-Based Facilitation and Reestablishing the Rules of Engagement

The opposite of anxiety isn’t calm, it’s trust.

Barry M. Prizant, Uniquely Human: A Different Way of Seeing Autism

Today’s leaders are rightfully anxious. While a calm inner self is helpful in leadership, these times specifically call for a focus on rebuilding trust within ourselves, each other, organizations, and in community. But how to do this has evolved in recent years. Trust does not flow vertically or upward as it did in previous decades. There is no expectation of a singular expert, policymaker, billionaire, newspaper, or activist to command our full trust.

When we receive information, it is prudent for us to fact-check it against other sources and even peers. This is because we are now socialized through the internet, political campaigns, social media, and AI tools to not believe in expert sources, but rather to believe in each other. A downside of this is exemplified in cases where measles vaccine hesitancy has led to children dying from a preventable disease. Echo chambers within a community can create misinformation, disinformation, and ultimately distrust.

A glimmer of opportunity in lateral trust is that today our reliance on each other matters more than ever. Engagement in our own reflection, with other individuals, and with teams and communities increases our confidence in what is reliable and safe in navigating the unknown. In other words, it supports the journey of establishing or reestablishing trust.

LLC facilitates this knowing by making space to introduce the rules of engagement with conscious relationship agreements, check-in questions, and consent and rebellion when we design agendas.

The conscious relationship agreements we use come to us by way of Coaching for Healing, Justice and Liberation, as well as LLC’s team and past participants:

• • Confidentiality: What’s learned here, leaves here. What’s said here, stays here.
  • Remember gratitude and experience joy while together.
  • Make space, take space. Be aware of your identities, the privilege they hold and use that to balance your participation.
  • Embrace raggedy thinking and allow yourself to get curious.
  • Practice being a witness to your own and others’ transformation.

When it comes to check-in questions, we choose questions related to the meeting agenda. Here are a few of our favorites:

• • When was the last time you giggled? (Inspired by our friends at StarLion Collective.)
  • If you could go back in time or to the future, who would you want to meet?
  • How do you put together IKEA furniture?

1. 1. 1. Read the manual and put it together.
      2. Watch videos about the product and ways to hack it.
      3. Open a bottle of wine and ask a friend to do it.
      4. Something else!

• • If everything you were fighting for was achieved and you could retire from doing social change work, what would you do and why? (From Aisha Shillingford of Intelligent Mischief.)
  • What could go right? (From Rhea Wong)

Through what we refer to as “consent and rebellion,” we offer a preview of the agenda in advance, reviewing it with teams and participants. We offer folks a chance to ask questions or make suggestions on how we might reprioritize the time together or rebel against the agenda. As our coexecutive director Ericka Stallings said, “We can’t ask for a ‘yes’ unless ‘no’ is a viable option as well.”

3. Third Places (or as close as we can get)

We were intentional in inviting you to this event, and not your organizations. Please help us honor this by bringing your experiences and unique perspectives, and shedding your titles as you enter the space.

LLC event invitation

When was the last time you showed up at an interesting event, and did not have to represent your job? Learnings from playing, mending, and holding events with other liberatory leaders have helped LLC understand the importance of third places, where our relationship to our work is not our primary identifier.

If we are practicing how to build our future community together, then it is important for leaders from different types of organizations and perspectives to forge connections, network, weave, and share wisdom outside of their official work roles and capacities. This helps disrupt echo chambers and also rebuilds trust.

In keeping the lessons on lateral trust in mind, LLC believes social good leaders will need to and want to spill their learnings into third places—or at least an aspirational space adjacent to work. It is happening in learning cohorts and communities of practice that pull individual leaders into group learning. General operating grants, investments in affinity groups and intermediaries, and work policies that allow staff to have time to engage in local communities allow us to create and cultivate these kinds of spaces.

Small Steps, Impactful Changes

We believe that by taking these small, intentional steps in our interactions, meetings, organizations, and communities, we can create the most important impact that our sector seeks: expanded empathy and freedom from oppressive and limiting self-beliefs, harmful interpersonal practices, and systems of oppression that rely on domination and extraction.

LLC designs and holds a space for imagining liberation together so we can one day have it.

For More on This Topic:

Liberatory Leadership: A Transformative Model for a Changing World

A Liberatory Approach to Centering Race in Leadership