Create shared understanding with the Liberating Structure "What, So What, Now What, and use the "Ladder Of Inference" as guidance.
How does this help your team?
Our human minds aren’t very accustomed to the complex, technological world we live in. We employ stereotypes to judge others, we generalize based on small observations and we jump to conclusions without considering the facts. This is especially tricky in the fast-paced environments we work in and the decisions we make there. “What new feature should we invest in for our product?”, “Why are we not delivering as rapidly as we should?” and “How can we avoid this incident from happening again?”
‘What, So What, Now What’ - created by Henri Lipmanowicz and Keith McCandless - is a foundational Liberating Structures that helps by asking us to step back and consider what is going on. It structures our thinking by breaking our experience down into three steps: “What do we notice?”, “So, what does this mean?”, and “Now, where do go from here?”. It takes inspiration from the Ladder of Inference by Chris Argyris, an expert on learning in organizations.
By doing this with others, we are encouraged to discover the gaps in our understanding by learning from their perspectives. Being a fairly simple structure, you can easily adapt it to suit the needs of the situation. And the more you do it, the more natural this structured approach to sense-making becomes.
Download the poster and use it as guidance for the structure "What, So What, Now What".
What do you receive?
- A large PDF with the "Ladder of Inference", ready for printing and sharing;
More inspiration
- A detailed description of the Liberating Structure "What, So What, Now What"