Learn by Failing Forward with Liberating Structures - Ecocycle Planning

How it used to go

From the sidelines, he saw it becoming increasingly clear.
The team was working hard. Not chaotically, but fully. Many projects were running simultaneously. Some had started small and had since grown large. Others had gotten stuck in endless meetings. Still others lay somewhere on the shelf — too important to stop, too vague to really start.

In conversations, it was mainly about priorities and capacity. About what needed to come first and what later. Rarely about how the whole was actually developing.
Everything was treated as equally important.

He noticed what that did. People became tired. Not from the work itself, but from the lack of overview. There was no language to say: this is stuck, this is growing, this needs attention, or this can stop.

The team saw the individual projects — but not the landscape.
And as long as that remained the case, learning became something accidental rather than something conscious.

A new structure

He decided to no longer have the conversation about what needed to happen, but about how the work was behaving.
During a session, he drew a large figure-eight on the wall. Four zones. He left them empty for now.

“Today I don’t want to plan,” he said.
“I want to look at how our work is developing.”

He introduced Ecocycle Planning.

Together they first mapped out everything the team was doing: projects, initiatives, routines, ideas. Each got a post-it.
Then he explained the four phases:

• Birth – what gains momentum and requires attention
• Maturity – what is stable and delivers returns
• Creative Destruction – what has served its purpose or is stuck
• Gestation – ideas, experiments, explorations

The assignment was simple, but precise:
“In which phase is this work currently, according to you?”

In small groups, people started placing post-its. Conversations quickly emerged.

“This project has been in the birth phase too long without a real breakthrough.”
“This initiative is actually mature, but we’re not harvesting enough from it yet.”
“Nothing’s happening here because we keep postponing it.”

For the first time, it became visible how the work as a whole was flowing — and where it was stuck.

What was liberated

What emerged was overview. A shared picture. People saw not only their own projects, but how everything related to each other.

That brought calm. The conversation shifted from defending to understanding. From this is important to what does this contribute to now?
Tensions also found a different place. Discussions turned out to be more about different perceptions of phase: one person wanted to accelerate, another felt that something was already past.

By making that visible, it became discussable — without becoming personal.
The team began to see the difference between:

• holding on because it must
• pushing forward because it can
• and letting go because it’s right

What shifted

After this session, Ecocycle Planning became a reference point.
In follow-up meetings, people asked themselves:

“Where does this actually sit in the cycle?”
“Are we growing here, or are we getting stuck?”

Some projects actually received more focus. The decision was made to really push them forward, with clear choices and resources. Other initiatives were consciously completed or stopped.
To make it manageable, 15% Solutions was introduced. Not to change everything, but to take small steps appropriate to the phase of the work.

With 1-2-4-All, he had people share what these insights meant to them personally:
Where did they need to make space, where could they actually take ownership?

Slowly the behavior changed. People learned to look at work as something living. Something that grows, matures, stagnates, and ends.
The culture shifted from doing everything simultaneously to conscious movement. Learning became not a byproduct, but part of how the team looked and chose.