How Your Student Organization Can Dream Big

As the year begins anew, some of you may sympathize with this: transitioning the organizations you’ve been a part of to the new incoming executive team, or perhaps becoming the incoming executive member.

As someone who’s been involved with student clubs and organizations since their undergraduate days, I recognize that the summer plays an increasing importantly role in strategic planning. It’s about the only time in the year where student leaders can spend some time thinking about long-term goals. In my experience, however, the time is usually spent on transitioning incoming executive members with aims of how to repeat the year or how to make events better, rather than aiming to adapt to changes the organization can expect in the future (which may include cancelling previous events).

I wanted to change that as I handed off my Process and Quality Improvement role at the IMAGINE Clinic.

The IMAGINE team is a relatively large one compared to most other undergraduate student organizations. You can figure that turning over such a large team is going to have its challenges. Previous executive transition meetings included a power-point presentation and some time to connect outgoing and incoming executive members. What I found lacking here is engagement of these executive members. I wanted to re-shape how transition meetings can be done and came upon Liberating Structures; a set of tools dedicated to fully involving your team to shape the future.

I had the opportunity to lead a few activities using Liberating Structures with the new IMAGINE team at their executive transition meeting, and here’s what I learned:

1. Anyone can do it!
This was the first time I had led activities based around the use of Liberating Structures. I didn’t quite follow the guides word-for-word. Instead, I adapted them to suit my needs for this transition meeting. I kept each activity’s principles in mind as I planned each one. By the end of the meeting, I had observed every member of the executive team contributing to the conversation.

2. Connect different roles efficiently
When designing the activities, I intentionally paired up certain roles, so they got to know each other in the organization. It was my hope that these initial and brief interactions set the stage for future collaboration. One of the pieces of feedback demonstrated that the individual had a much better idea of how each role contributes to the success of IMAGINE through participation of these activities.

3. Time Flies
I think many, if not all, of us have been through an activity where the clock seems to tick and tick and the end seems to never be in sight. That wasn’t the case during this meeting! The activities kept everyone on their feet, with ideas and thoughts being shared left and right and before I knew it, the meeting was at a close. My only regret was being unable to participate in the full experience as I spent most of it leading the activities.

By the end of the meeting, there were many ideas that executives wanted to act on. Most importantly though, there was a feeling that everyone wanted to do it together.

I hope you’ll consider using Liberating Structures at one of your next meetings. It’s a simple yet powerful way to connect within your team to figure out how far you can go!

Feel free to reach out to me if you’d like to talk about how to implement them! You can find me on Facebook (/edmondchiu92), Twitter (@edmondchiu_rph), or LinkedIn.

The IMAGINE team sharing through Liberating Structures!