85. Revealing Metaphors – a useful Clean Language addition to Liberating Structures

This highly usable format from Judy Rees offers a different way of ‘stretching the world’

This time we’re looking at a new and slightly different way to get people connecting at the start of working together. This might be a workshop, a new team kick-off, a strategy day or just a regular weekly gathering. It uses Clean Language, an approach that’s been around for something like the same amount of time as Solution Focus (SF) but comes at things from a slightly different position.

‘Revealing Metaphors’ is the name given to this very simple Clean Language process by Judy Rees. Judy has been working with Clean for ages and also established herself as a go-to person for online collaboration tips in the pandemic lockdowns. I’ve known her for years and she’s a super font of wisdom on these topics. She has her own Substack too, where all her previous work can be found – well worth subscribing. Judy offers this process as a candidate for a new Liberating Structure (LS) – so, we’ll start by looking at the LS’s and then go on to this new and very usable option.

Judy Rees

Liberating Structures

LS’s are microstructures for conversation which help everyone get involved, be engaged and have a say on how to move forward. The idea is that many conventional structures found at work – presentations, status reports, managed discussions – are a turn-off for most participants and actually lead to stuckness and no progress. LS’s democratise processes of exchange, learning and future-building so that everyone can play their part – that’s why they are liberating!

Back in the day we used to call this skilful facilitation - but facilitation could get very controlling and complicated. The great thing about LS’s is they are simple and quick to learn, easy to implement (for the most part) and anyone can play without the need for training or extra skills. There are 33 core LS’s, all freely available on the website as well as in PDF and print books. This diagram sums them up.

To give you a feel for what’s involved, one of the simplest LS’s is 1-2-4-All. Broadly, the process goes like this:

• Silent self-reflection by individuals on a shared challenge, framed as a question (e.g., What opportunities do YOU see for making progress on this challenge? How would you handle this situation? What ideas or actions do you recommend?) 1 min.

• Generate ideas in pairs, building on ideas from self-reflection. 2 min.

• Share and develop ideas from your pair in foursomes (notice similarities and differences). 4 min.

• Ask, “What is one idea that stood out in your conversation?” Each group shares one important idea with all (repeat cycle as needed). 5 min.

See how this is a process into which any content can be added? Everyone gets to participate, the whole thing takes maybe 15 minutes, and a whole bunch of useful things can emerge.

In order to qualify as an LS, the process has to meet ten criteria:

Picture from Nancy White’s website https://fullcirc.com/2025/05/15/so-you-want-to-create-a-new-liberating-structure/

One of the things I love about LS’s is that one can solution-focus-ise them by adding SF questions into the mix. So, to use the 1-2-4-All structure as an example, rathe than the proposed

• What opportunities do YOU see for making progress on this challenge?

We might instead set people off with:

• What would be the first tiny signs that we are making progress on this challenge?

This would lead to a series of conversations about tiny signs of progress – which if they are really tiny can so easily be turned into small next steps, as I have written about here before.

It’s possible to propose new Liberating Structures – the details of how to do it are on this not-at-all easy to find web page https://fullcirc.com/2025/05/15/so-you-want-to-create-a-new-liberating-structure/. There doesn’t seem to be much appetite for actually adding new elements to the original 33, but it’s a good discipline to think about how one might refine something to fit the ten ambitions given above. This is what Judy has done, using her work on Clean Language as the starting point. So, what is Clean Language?

Clean Language

Clean Language approaches

“help people learn how to facilitate their own creativity in solving their own problems in their own way”

(to quote Ernest Rossi, Milton Erickson’s long-time collaborator, in a 2023 issue of the NLP journal Rapport). So, not unlike Solution Focus then. Indeed, both approaches take the language of the client very seriously and attempt to work with it to expand it rather than replace it with the practitioner’s language. The difference comes in how they do it. While SF often looks to build detail, Clean looks to expand the metaphors being used by the client.

The Clean approach was initially developed by New Zealand-born psychologist David Grove (1950-2008) and has been taken on around the world. London-based Penny Tompkins and James Lawley are leading lights in the movement; I have known them for years and participated in a small co-supervision group with them some years ago. Judy Rees is very skilled at Clean and is particularly interested in organisational and workplace applications; follow her Substack!

As Penny and James say in their introduction article:

Let’s be clear: Clean Language influences and directs attention. All language does this. However most language directs attention to aspects outside of what a person has expressed. Clean Language works within their frames of reference.

Again, we could say much the same about how SF works by directing attention to overlooked aspects of a person’s experience; overlooked either because it doesn’t seem relevant (with the frame of problem solving) or because it’s connected to an imagined better future.

I could go into explaining lots more about how Clean works here, but that’s outside the scope of this piece and there are lots of online resources. However, we can get a little taste of Clean by looking at Judy’s proposed LS.

Revealing Metaphors – a new Liberating Structure?

This structure is ideal for the start of an event – a high-energy ‘mixer’ which gets people talking, introduces something about the topic under consideration and also uses two simple Clean questions to get people exploring and expanding their experience together. Judy has written about it at https://www.sessionlab.com/methods/jediplication-an-energiser-to-multiply-engagement. I’m going to share the basics here to give you the idea.

Beforehand: Find a starter question for the workshop or event. This will both connect to the theme and invite the participants to come up with a personal word that connects with their experience. So, if the workshop is about safety at work, a suitable starter question might be:

• When you’re fully focused on creating a safe workplace, you are like… what?

Everyone thinks of an answer. Then invite them to roughly sketch their answer on a piece of paper, post-it or even their name badge. Then, put up a slide this with information on it:

• What kind of X?

• Is there anything else about X?

The X in these questions stands for any of the person’s own words. The questions can be asked in any order, as many times as you like, about anything the person says. Keep going until the time is up!

Then invite people into an energetic and relevant quick-fire activity to get things underway. Explain the instructions – in pairs, one will be the Talker first, and the other the Asker. The Talker kicks things off by saying a few words about their drawing. The Asker then uses the two questions to explore and reveal more about the metaphor. Judy recommends doing a demo in front of everyone (a good idea!), which will take about two minutes.

Then get people to find a partner and start talking! Two minutes. Then swap roles and do it the other way around – another two minutes. Now, find another partner and repeat the process. And another partner, making three rounds of four minutes in all.

Then bring people back together again and ask:

• OK, is there an insight or reflection that you think everyone should hear?

Take two or three brief contributions and then link into the next activity for your workshop. Note that the purpose here is not that these final shares are amazingly important – the real power of the activity comes from the pairs conversations which everyone will carry with them as the event progresses.

If you’re working with groups and would like to try this, I heartily encourage you to do so! Read Judy’s full version first. Judy is looking for feedback and shared experiences about this brief activity so do please let her know how you get on.

Judy says:

"It's been an honour to work with Keith McCandless and Nancy White to refine this Structure: they've given me masses of useful feedback and co-created something that's much more refined than I could have done alone. When this structure gets people listening to each other, in such a way that people get the chance to talk about what's important to them and to feel heard, that'll be a great result for me."

Stretching the world in a new way

I have written here before about how Solution Focused conversations ‘stretch the world’ of the client by creating the possibility for newly relevant interactions which can help move things in a useful direction. It seems to me that Clean conversations – of which this is perhaps the simplest example – also have a way of stretching the world and experience of everyone involved. In this case the stretch comes not from thinking about interactional details, but from expanding on an initial metaphor during a real (if brief) conversation while being invited to talk and think by someone else.

My experience of such Clean conversations is that they very quickly get into unexplored territory. Even if you knew that starter words/metaphor (and often you don’t) then the questioning has you developing words and ideas around it very quickly. This is what the Clean people call ‘emergent knowledge’ – new experiences created in conversation.

Conclusions

This very brief introduction shows perhaps the simplest way of starting to use Clean in a workshop context. I think it’s interesting and relevant for those of us seeking to create, lead and working humane and effective organisations. It’s about helping people build on their own experiences and capacities in an emergent and supportive way while being very open about what directions might emerge.

The Liberating Structures in general are equally at home anywhere where humanity and effectiveness are jointly valued. Away with fixed agendas, tedious updates, boring presentations and performative process; liberate your people (and yourself) to have conversations that both matter and make a useful difference.

---

Dates and mates

Judy’s Substack – well worth following.

There will be one more Steps To A Humanity Of Organisation before the summer break for July and August.