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Event Details
Built for This! A Liberating Structures Immersion for Leading Teams Under Pressure
Your team is under pressure. The old meeting formats won't cut it.
Budget cuts. Layoffs. Reorgs. AI making every decision messier. Your team is being asked to do more with less, make harder calls faster, and stay aligned while the ground keeps shifting.
This is exactly when most teams schedule even more ineffective meetings: one person talks, everyone else waits, side conversations burble, and nothing gets decided.
Liberating Structures fixes the meeting architecture. Instead of one person driving while everyone else rides, every voice contributes, ideas build on each other, and the group's collective intelligence comes out in the room. Full engagement. Full participation. Energetic. Stuff gets done.
It works for a team meeting, a stakeholder session, a planning offsite, or those difficult conversations you've been postponing.
Liberating Structures has 30 years of field-tested practice behind it, a robust practitioner community, and a fieldbook so new the ink is still drying. This is a toolkit you can count on.
Ready to change how your team works? Join us September 9–10 in Portland at the beautiful World Forestry Center for a two-day immersion where you’ll experience Liberating Structures firsthand and leave ready to use them the following week.
What you’ll walk away with
You’ll spend two days inside the structures themselves, experiencing them as a participant, then learning to design and facilitate them for your own context.
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Hands-on practice with a wide range of the 43! Liberating Structures
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Skill to design “strings” — sequences of structures built for your specific challenges
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Real problems worked on — not fabricated case studies
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Liberating Structures supporting materials
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Lunch both days, beverages throughout, and time with good people you’ll actually get to know
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Free admission to the World Forestry Center Museum
No prior LS experience required. If you’ve encountered these methods before, you’ll go deeper into design and application.
Who this is for
If you lead, facilitate, or participate in groups and want those groups to work better, this workshop is for you. In practice, that means team leaders and managers, change managers, L&D and OD professionals, scrum masters, design thinkers, facilitators, and nonprofit leaders working in complex stakeholder environments.
Bringing a team of 3 or more? Contact us about group pricing.
Meet Your Facilitators
Elise Keith liberally applies Liberating Structures to every session she designs as the founder of Lucid Teams, the New Rules for Work Labs, and the open Ways of Working initiative. A leading voice in modern collaboration, she helps teams reinvent their meetings, decision making, and ways of working. She’s the author of Where the Action Is: The Meetings that Make or Break Your Organization, and a fifth-generation Oregonian.
Stephanie Fleming is the founder of Viri Group, where she helps organizations close the gap between strategy and execution. With 30 years leading teams across Fortune 500 companies, startups, and nonprofits, she's learned that team dynamics is the biggest predictor of whether a strategy will succeed or fail, which is why she brings psychological safety and Liberating Structures into every engagement she designs. In a board retreat she facilitated, that combination enabled a leadership team to make decisions and align on priorities they'd been unable to resolve for years. An unabashed tree hugger, she jumped at the chance to co-host this intensive at the World Forestry Center.
Frequently Asked Questions
Do I need prior experience with Liberating Structures?
No. We design for the room we have. If you’ve used Liberating Structures before, you’ll go deeper into design and practice. If it’s your first time, you’ll leave with a solid foundation and the confidence to use it.
What’s the refund policy?
If you can’t attend, you may transfer your registration to someone else. Just let us know. Refunds are available until August 15, minus any payment processing fees.
Can my organization send multiple people?
Yes! Shared experience accelerates adoption back at work. Contact us for group pricing for teams of 3 or more.
Are professional development credits available?
This intensive includes 14 hours of professional development. Participants holding Scrum Alliance, PMI, or other credentials that allow self-reporting may be eligible to log these hours toward their renewal requirements. We provide a certificate of attendance upon request. Check with your credentialing body for eligibility.
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The structures, illustrations, and icons used in this session are part of the Liberating Structures Fieldbook (2026). We believe in open-source social innovation. This material is adapted from the original work by Keith McCandless and Nancy White and is licensed for your further use and adaptation under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0."
Location
World Forestry Center
4033 SW Canyon Rd, Portland, OR 97221, USA
Paid parking on site via Parking Kitty. MAX accessible via Washington Park station (3 minute walk).
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