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all three come alive. Otherwise, many group members likely will not endorse a purpose generated without them. They will not put their energy to advance it or, worse, will resist or block it.
    The importance of self-discovery and cocreation doesn’t stop with purpose. They are just as essential for making sense of challenges and for developing solutions that are likely to be adopted, adaptable, and successful. What is standard in most organizations is importing best practices or imposing practices from above. The assumption that a best practice will work everywhere is just too convenient to resist. So is the assumption that local context and people, though important, will not matter enough to make the difference. Plus, best practices fit nicely with the deep-seated notion that reinventing the wheel is a waste of time and money. Unfortunately, importing or imposing best practices usually involves trying to fit a square peg in a round hole. Context, culture, and people do matter more than we like to admit, and resistance inevitably emerges when we discount them.
    Customer Service the Best-Practice Way
    Consider this example of a conventional expert-driven approach to a customer-service issue ( Figure 3.2 ). The leader of an organization perceives there is a problem with customer service and competition is increasing for the attention of customers. An external consultant is brought in to analyze the dimensions of the problem and report to top management. An external expert is then hired to generate a solution in the form of a series of best practices for exceptional service. A plan to launch the new service concept is hatched by a leader-sponsor who is inspired by a best-selling management book with success stories from other companies. A training program is designed that addresses the dimensions of the problem identified in the initial analysis. Training for frontline employees follows, cascading down the organization. A series of communications strategies are implemented to generate buy-in and overcome resistance to change. The project is reported as “Mission Accomplished.” A few months later, momentum has evaporated and nothing much has changed about the quality of customer service. Now the program is rarely mentioned.
    The unspoken principles here in the minds of the leaders were:
“We don’t know how to solve this problem, so the people in the middle of it (those who created the problem and who are less smart than we are) are even less capable of figuring out what to do. Solutions and innovations can only come from external experts.”
    We would suggest that the so-called nonexperts, the frontline people close to the challenge, are the ones who are most likely to come up with and sustain workable solutions to the customer-service issues. BUT , getting there requires tapping the hidden or unexpressed know-how of the frontline workers. This is where Liberating Structures come in.
    Figure 3.2
    A Top-Down, Expert-Driven Change Progression
    Customer Service the Self-Discovery Way
    With Liberating Structures, the difference is that from the start, frontline people, leaders, and users agree there is a problem with customer service ( Figure 3.3 ). Several project leaders from the internal organization are invited to step up. The team’s approach to exploring the challenge of providing great service isprimarily focused on learning from frontline staff and the organization’s customers. They use DAD, Simple Ethnography, Appreciative Interview , and TRIZ to gradually engage all frontline groups and a variety of customers. These structures engage the people with the best knowledge of the situation in identifying successful behaviors and practices in current use. Improv Prototyping sessions are organized to spread learning and improve existing practices. New informal leaders step up as local ownership inspires more people to take action and networks are reinforced with Social Network Webbing . Barriers are identified and local