Feed Forward
This is Liberating Structures' Wise Crowds, run under the name 'Feed Forward' (not Marshall Goldsmith's quicker one-to-one feedforward exercise of the same name): a facilitated group of ten or more discusses your stuck challenge while you sit turned away and silent, so you hear a batch of forward-looking suggestions instead of getting drawn into defending your own thinking, and it needs a room, chairs, and real facilitation to run properly.
Seven boxes run left to right, from sitting in the circle through the silent listening phase to turning back and rotating on to the next person.
Reach for this when…
- A team keeps circling the same stuck problem in every meeting.
- Feedback conversations turn defensive before anything useful gets said.
- One person needs fresh eyes on a challenge without a formal review.
How to run it
- Sit the group in a circle, at least ten people, splitting into small satellite groups if it's larger.
- One person presents their challenge for two minutes, then takes two minutes of clarifying questions.
- They turn their chair to face outward, pen and paper ready.
- For around seven minutes the group offers advice and observations to each other, not to the person, who just listens and takes notes.
- Satellite groups discuss the challenge among themselves and add their own observations.
- Everyone reconvenes and shares the key insights that came up.
- The presenter turns back and shares what landed, then the group rotates to the next person.
A worked example
Situation. Sofie Peeters ran Noordlicht Creative, a small marketing agency in Ghent, Belgium, and had spent three team meetings alone circling the same client problem with no fresh angle.
Applied. Her team ran a single round: she turned her chair outward and the group generated fourteen suggestions in twenty minutes while she just listened and wrote.
Result. Two of the fourteen were things she'd never have reached alone, sitting in the conversation and defending her own thinking as she normally would.
The catch
Turning your back and staying silent while people discuss you is genuinely uncomfortable, and some presenters interrupt anyway, which collapses the format's whole point. The group's advice is only as good as the group's real insight into the problem; a room with limited context produces a lot of well-meaning noise. And without a facilitator keeping time and structure, the advice phase drifts into a general discussion that stops being useful to the person who can't respond.
If the presenter is nodding and responding while turned away, the exercise has quietly become an ordinary discussion.
Origin: Henri Lipmanowicz & Keith McCandless (Liberating Structures - Wise Crowds)