Liberating Structures
Simple Ethnography
Observe and record actual behaviors of users in the field. This structure sends people into the field to observe how people actually use a product, service, or space — then brings them back to share fresh insights that challenge assumptions. It’s fast ethnography that brings the real world into your meeting room, sparking empathy and uncovering invisible needs.
Simple Ethnography
What is made possible - What it unlocks
Simple Ethnography breaks teams out of conference room speculation and puts them face-to-face with reality. Participants discover the gap between what they think is happening and what’s actually happening. They develop deep empathy for users, spot unmet needs, and return energized with concrete stories that cut through abstract debates. Everyone becomes a researcher, and everyone’s perspective shifts.
When to use it
- When you’re designing or improving a product, service, or experience and need real user insights
- When teams are making assumptions about users without direct contact or observation
- When you need to build empathy across departments (engineering, marketing, leadership)
- When you’re stuck in abstract discussions and need concrete, grounded stories
- When launching a new initiative and want to understand the current state firsthand
- When evaluating whether a solution is actually solving the problem it was designed for
- When you want to uncover hidden user needs and unexpected use cases
- When preparing for a design sprint or innovation session and need raw material
🛠️ The five design elements of Simple Ethnography
Each Liberating Structure consists of five simple design elements to make participation possible for everyone. By shaping these elements with care, you move beyond rigid control or chaos and create space for people to contribute, listen, and co-create.
- 1. The Invitation
- 2. Setup & Materials
- 3. Participation Flow
- 4. Group Configuration
- 5. Sequence & Timing
How you frame the purpose or question that sets the focus and energy of the group.
Invite participants to silently observe people with experience relevant to the challenge at hand and then follow up with interviews for more insight.
“Go out and observe how people actually use product/service/space. Watch what they do, listen to what they say, notice what surprises you. Come back ready to share stories about what you discovered.”
The arrangement of space and which tools or resources are needed to support interaction.
- A gathering space to start and for debrief and story-sharing afterward
- Access to the environment or local setting where users interact with your product/service/space (workplace, client organization, neighborhood).
- Provide notebook, pens, phones, camera, video, permission (if needed)
Who gets a voice and how everyone is actively included in the process.
- All core-group members working on a challenge are included as ethnographers
- Everyone has an equal opportunity to contribute
- After observation, teams gather to share what they learned
How people are arranged (alone, small groups, or all together) and how this shifts during the activity.
- Send people out for observation individually or in a groups of 2
- Whole group for debrief
- Works with any size group — just send multiple small teams
The step-by-step flow of the activity and the time given to each step to keep energy and focus.
- Explain the problem to be solved and the current understanding of the situation. (5 min)
- Identify sites to observe and people to shadow that will reveal user experience in depth. (5 min)
- Invite participants to visit sites and observe interactions and activities without speaking, recording details and internal reflections as they go. (10–180 min)
- Ask participants to select behaviors they observed that address the challenge in a novel way (in part or in whole). Then follow up by asking those individuals what they were feeling and doing as they engaged in the behavior. (20–180 min)
- Reconvene the group and use 1-2-4-All to compare notes and find patterns across observations or exceptional solutions. (15 min)
- Write up observations or compose stories that highlight needs and opportunities. (10–20 min)
- Feed insights into brainstorming and prototyping efforts. (10 min)
- Repeat steps until the core group feels they have a powerful new approach to prototype.
Total time: 75 minutes – 7 hours
Online version
Adapted for virtual use, with the same impact
You can do Simple Ethnography fully online (by observing online meetings and collaboration patterns) or you can do a hybrid version where you gather online at the start and end. In between participants go out to the local setting where users interact with your product/service/space (workplace, client organization, neighborhood).
For the online parts you use breakout rooms when convening in small groups.
Use a digital whiteboard or other online collaboration tool to gather all the observations and to compose the user stories. Save and regularly come back to review and reflect.
Total time: 75 minutes – 7 hours
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All Liberating Structures in 1 e-book
All Liberating Structures (44!) including explanations, visual step-by-step guide, and worksheets in a handy workbook for € 11,-
- Simple methods for big changes
- Have interactions that truly matter
- Build a culture of innovation step by step
- Involve and activate everyone in the group
Proven over decades
🧠 Why it works
Liberating Structures are not magic tricks—they work because they tap into how people naturally think, connect, and collaborate. Each structure is carefully designed to unlock participation, spark creativity, and build trust, using principles grounded in social science and human interaction.
Attribution: Liberating Structure developed by Henri Lipmanowicz and Keith McCandless. Inspired by Chris McCarthy and ethnographers in the Innovation Learning Network.
Direct Contact
Observing real behavior beats assumptions every time — it grounds decisions in reality, not imagination.
Empathy Activation
Seeing users struggle or succeed builds emotional connection that abstract data can't match.
Pattern Recognition
Multiple observers catch different details, and comparing notes reveals what's universal versus what's unique.
Cognitive Disruption
Leaving familiar spaces and encountering the unexpected breaks mental ruts and opens minds to new possibilities.
Riffs and Variations
Start with creative constraints to learn this structure and then... go liberate yourself and try some variations.
- Storytelling template — Use a narrative structure like the Hero’s Journey to help participants structure their observations
- Draw or build the challenge — Ask participants to sketch, diagram, or create physical models of what they observed — nonverbal methods often reveal deeper patterns and insights that words miss
- Client co-observation — Invite clients or users to document their own experiences through photos, videos, or journals, then share these self-recorded perspectives with the team for discussion
- Remote ethnography — Send teams to observe online communities, forums, or video recordings of user sessions
- Shadow a user — Instead of passive observation, follow someone through their entire journey with your product/service
- Customer interviews on-site — Combine observation with brief, informal conversations to understand the “why” behind behaviors
- Role reversal — Have designers observe engineers, leadership observe frontline staff, etc.
- Time-lapse ethnography — Observe the same environment at different times of day or week to spot patterns
Tips
Lessons learned from other facilitators.
- Go with genuine curiosity, not a pre-formed agenda — focus on observing what’s actually there
- Capture exact quotes and inconspicuous details — they bring stories to life and reveal hidden insights
- Notice what surprises you, what’s irregular, intimate, or unpretentious — that’s where the gold is
- Look for what is imperfect, crude, or impermanent — deviance can be positive and revealing
- Stay comfortable with ambiguity — avoid adding meaning and interpretations too quickly to observations
- Take photos (with permission) to make the debrief more vivid and concrete
- Be prepared to repeat observation rounds until you feel you have a powerful new approach to prototype
Traps
Don't make the same mistakes.
- Over-directing observers so they only see what you want them to see
- Sending teams without enough time — rushing kills the magic of deep observation
- Interfering too much with users — you want natural behavior, not performance
- Adding interpretations too quickly or focusing on material/technological hierarchy instead of intrinsic qualities
- Skipping the debrief — that’s where individual observations become collective insight
- Treating observations as “proof” rather than perspective — stay humble and open
- Forgetting to do follow-up ethnography after implementing your new approach — insights without validation breed assumptions
Try it with…
The real power of Liberating Structures emerges when you combine them into "strings." Link different structures together to build on insights and create more powerful results. Here are some nice combinations:
- Nine Whys — After sharing observations, dig deeper into root causes
- 1-2-4-All — Process and pattern-spot the observations in progressive rounds
- What, So What, Now What? (W3) — Make sense of observations and decide on next steps
- 15% Solutions — Immediately after ethnography, identify small actions based on what you learned
- Users Experience Fishbowl — Invite actual users into the debrief conversation
- Design Storyboards — Turn observations into visual journey maps or storyboards
Field stories
To get to know Liberating Structures without having used them yourself, it helps to see familiar situations from real-life practice. Chances are that you or your team have faced one of these challenges before. Discover how to approach these kinds of situations in a fresh and engaging way.
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Simple Ethnography
Observe and record actual behaviors of users in the field.
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