The Pigeon Test: Structures

Five workshop structures for groups who want to work out, from their own evidence, what kind of work they are actually doing. Start with Same Plan, Ten Times. It needs no preparation or reading, and it hands a group the distinction every other structure here assumes. If you only ever run one of these, run that one. Then pick by what your group is stuck on.

Three things share the pigeon’s name, and it’s worth separating them before you start. The book is the argument. The Pigeon Test is a free tool that reads one situation. You answer a set of questions about something you’re about to do, and it comes back with simple, complicated or complex, and what that reading means for the move you were planning. Simple and complicated are both the ball; complex is the pigeon. It tells you where you are rather than what to do, and the reading expires, because situations move. It’s coming soon.

The Pigeon Test Structures, the five that follow, get to the same place without the tool. No questions from me and no reading handed back. A group puts its work on a wall and reaches a finding from its own evidence.

I nearly left these out of the book. The argument in it is that we keep applying linear recipes to complex situations, and that the people selling the recipes, me very much included, keep doing it because recipes are what sell. So there is something off about arriving at the end of it and handing you five workshops. Here comes the next framework, dressed up as the cure for frameworks.

I have two defences, and I’m not sure either holds. The first is that they don’t tell you what to do. Each one puts your own work, in your own handwriting, on a wall, and asks a question your group answers from its own evidence. I’m not in the room and neither is the book. Nobody has to have read a word of it, and nobody has to say the word complexity. Whatever the wall ends up saying, it says about you, and I’ve no way of knowing in advance what that will be.

The second is that they refuse what the recipes promise. There’s no end state in any of them. No roadmap, no date, no maturity model, no report. Two of them finish by making something smaller than anybody wanted it to be, and one finishes by asking a group to protect something nobody ever planned. Whether that adds up to honouring the argument or quietly breaking it, I don’t know. You’ll judge it better than I can.

They’re early. They’ve been tested with teams and they’ll go on being tested, because that’s the only thing that improves them. Every time a group takes one out, something turns out to be wrong with it, usually a timing that never holds or a question that invites the flattering answer, and now and then a step that needed one more sentence and hasn’t got it. So they’ll carry on being adapted, and the versions printed in the book will fall behind the ones in use. These are the current ones, free, and they get corrected here as groups run them and tell me what broke. If you try one, I’d like to hear how it went, and I’d rather hear about the bit that didn’t work. Write to me at mark.eddleston@gmail.com.

The pigeon itself, which all three are named after, is the metaphor the book is built on. None of the five requires anybody to have heard it. The structures are for rooms. Three are walls and two are chairs. The walls deliver their finding once per group; treat them as events. The chairs give you something different every time. Pick from them like a menu, and don’t run more than two in a day.

You don’t need to be a facilitator to run one. Somebody keeps time and asks the questions on the page, and that’s the whole job. Foursomes are two pairs joined; a leftover pair or single folds into the nearest foursome, and a five or six just argues harder. Each has an optional close for groups who have read the book. If they haven’t, skip it; the structure has to work without the argument. That was the test I set myself.

The format belongs to Liberating Structures (opens in a new tab), a free collection of ways to run a room, put together by Henri Lipmanowicz and Keith McCandless. I’ve been using them for years and I can’t name anything that has done more for the rooms I’ve worked in.

They come out of complexity science, which is why they’re in the book. Their authors describe the whole thing as a bet that what we know about how living systems organise themselves might translate into how people work together. It isn’t the only ingredient, and several of the individual structures owe debts elsewhere, but it’s the foundation. A Liberating Structure is that bet made practical. It sets a handful of simple rules about who talks to whom and for how long, then gets out of the way and lets a group produce something nobody in it designed. The formats we default to can’t do that. A presentation or a managed discussion holds people too tightly. An open discussion or a brainstorm lets them go altogether. Both end up with the same three voices.

And they don’t need me, which is the part I admire most. They’re free and deliberately simple, and anyone can run one straight off the page without training and without a professional facilitator in the room. That was the standard I tried to hold these five to. They aren’t a silver bullet. Nothing is, and a book arguing that should be the last place you hear otherwise.

They’re in that style, not part of the official repertoire, and the flaws are mine. Four of the five borrow its escalation wholesale, alone to pairs to foursomes to everyone, which is 1-2-4-All (opens in a new tab). Each structure ends with a note saying where it came from. Where one of these is built on an existing Liberating Structure, it says so. Where it only ended up resembling one, it says that instead.