Why someone who can't stand step-by-step instructions is building a platform of step-by-step activities. A few thoughts after two Case Clinic circles.
As a child I was signed up for drawing lessons. The teacher showed us, step by step, how to draw a little fox. I sat quietly, bothered no one, and lesson after lesson drew my own multicoloured stripes, layering them one over another like the layers of a cake. It ended with the teacher advising my parents to "have the child checked", because she wasn't doing what she was told.
That resistance to step-by-step instructions is still with me. So it's worth explaining why I'm building LudensFlow, where every activity is written out in steps. This time through Case Clinic, a method from Theory U that I went through this autumn in two different circles.
Where Theory U came from for me
I first heard about Theory U in 2017 at "86", a festival of film and urbanism in Slavutych, near Chornobyl. It was the second-to-last edition: the following year it took place for the final time. Besides film, it brought together activists from civil society organisations across Ukraine: there was a need to talk about structural change. The session was called "Participation that fails: how to ensure real rather than token community involvement". Mariana Zaviiska and her colleagues from Open Space Works facilitated it in the Open Space format.
What struck me then was the paradox of that format. There are many rules, everything is regulated, and at the same time that very frame allowed fifty highly active people, each with their own pain and their own questions, to build the agenda and the schedule themselves.
The principles hung on the walls in big letters, among them: "Whatever happens is the only thing that could have." If nobody comes to your topic, that is information for you, and it says nothing bad about the people. You can move to another circle at any moment, or stay. The inner critic asking "am I doing this right, is it taking too long" goes quiet. What remains is trust in the field.
It was from Mariana that I learned about Otto Scharmer's Theory U and the Presencing Institute. A year later she facilitated a strategy session, as a volunteer, for the village where my civil society organisation works. I'm still grateful to her.
Theory U is systems thinking enriched with mindfulness practices. As in Process Work, feelings and weak signals that are easy to miss also matter here. But there is a third element that brought me back to the theory: its orientation towards action and social change. One of its basic ideas goes roughly like this: you can only understand a system by starting to change it.
Two circles
This year Scharmer announced a new u.lab cohort, and I heard about it from Olena Miroshnychenko. She wrote on LinkedIn that she was looking for people to learn with, and gathered a Ukrainian circle even before the programme itself invited participants to form groups. We got to know each other before the start.
For me this worked like an engine. An online course is easy to put off. When you meet people regularly, you want to understand the material so you can be fully present in the conversation. You learn both for yourself and out of responsibility to the circle.
The second circle appeared unexpectedly. During a joint live session with a few hundred people from all over the world, participants were invited to create a circle or join an existing one. The circles filled up very quickly, and none of them spoke to me. Then something inside me gave a push, and I registered my own circle: Banality of Evil, after Hannah Arendt.
For me this is a topic about systems. About how people lose their humanity by justifying terrible things with "I was just doing my job". And about how, working as cogs in a system, together we can create evil on an unimaginable scale, like the concentration camps of the Second World War.
Each circle has 4 to 6 people, and in both we went through Case Clinic step by step.
A circle where nobody gives advice
One person (the case giver) brings a real situation they need help with. The other participants are coaches, and they have one main rule: don't give advice, listen deeply. After the story come a few minutes of silence, then everyone mirrors the images, feelings or gestures that came up in them, then the group thinks further together from those images, and it all closes with appreciation and writing for yourself. The full script with timings is on the Case Clinic page.
I know other peer consultation formats too: dominant ideas, the incident method, Socratic dialogue. All three are on LudensFlow, and I practised all three in a peer consultation group of Dutch school leaders. What they have in common is that people move within rules, and the rules knock thinking out of its usual track. The new thoughts that appear are still yours, just wider than your usual ones.
Case Clinic added four things to this that I want to highlight.
Silence written into the script
After the case is presented, there is time to think and not react straight away. It's the pause between impulse and response, built right into the process. The temptation is strong: "I've got it, I know what to ask." But it is exactly in this delay that other associations and connections have time to form.
The same mechanism works in the classroom. That's why so many classroom activities have built-in thinking time.
What resonated in you
In the mirroring step there is a pull to analyse and advise from your own experience. In one of our groups we had to stop and come back to the question: what is this doing to you?
Sometimes what someone says sounds irrelevant. You can't trace a logical link, but at the level of intuition everyone feels it resonate. This level of openness is hard, and not everyone is ready for it, or not straight away.
Continuing someone else's thought
Generative dialogue turned out to be the hardest step for me. Saying what came up in you is one thing. Picking up another person's thought and building on it is something else entirely.
We live in a world of copyright, and here your thought suddenly becomes a brick in a shared structure. You're afraid of spoiling the previous participant's idea, or of steering the conversation somewhere they never meant to go. Starting is easier than continuing, so the group keeps returning to the case giver and starting over.
Next time I want to stay longer in the building-on. The task of this step is to create together from the case, without analysing it again. The further from the case, the shakier the structure and the more careful people become.
Gratitude, and notes you don't share
During the dialogue I kept fearing I was off base: telling my own story and not engaging enough with the other person's. And then, in the gratitude step, you hear that people valued exactly what seemed least appropriate to you. This step gives people back the value of what they contributed.
What I found most valuable was that people spoke from a completely different worldview, and that it was uncomfortable to hear. I left the case clinic and I'm still tripping over it. Which is to say, I'm still thinking.
It all ends with a short journaling that you don't share. Most peer consultation methods rely on everyone sharing everything with everyone. Here the balance is different: helping others, helping yourself, and the right to draw conclusions just for yourself.
When you know you'll have to read your notes out, you write differently. When you know nobody will see them, you can also write down what is embarrassing, risky or awkward to share.
Piano and trampoline
Back to the fox. My resistance to algorithms hasn't gone anywhere. I want to trust my own insights and lay them on the table straight away, in the form they arrived in. An algorithm seems to cut that off.
But I graduated from music school in bandura, and now I'm learning the piano. And I know: you can't show depth or passion until your fingers have learned the keys. First comes the algorithm, for a long time, hours and hours of other people's pieces.
If I sit down and pound the keys with my fists because I have a lot of emotions, hardly anyone will feel it. If I practise the technique, there is a chance that something will start to stir in the people listening. The frame didn't let me move the way I was used to, and forced me to look for other moves.
It's the same with activities. The more formats you try, the more sides of yourself you discover. That's how raw energy finds a skilled form and reaches other people. And then action becomes possible: understanding a system by starting to change it. Blaming the system is easy. Changing it for the better, with skill, is the real challenge.
Recently my son, after trampoline practice, explained how to do a somersault with a twist. There is a moment in the air when you have to make a counterintuitive move: it seems your arms should go right, but actually they should go left. That's when the body completes the turn properly.
For me, structure is that kind of counterintuitive move for learning to be myself. It's my edge, my difficulty. Maybe that's why LudensFlow matters so much to me: step-by-step formats weren't my natural language. I had to accept them, test them and see that they work.
Try it yourself
You don't need a certificate to run a Case Clinic. In our circle everyone is still learning: some have finished the first module, some haven't. And it already works, and every meeting adds depth and skill.
The description on LudensFlow is enough to gather 4 to 6 colleagues and run your first case clinic on your own: Case Clinic on LudensFlow. And if you'd like to compare, the peer consultation hub has five more methods: dominant ideas, the incident method, Socratic dialogue, trio advice and the gossip method.