Liberating Structures
Mad Tea
Playfully expand the scope for reflections, insights and actions. Mad Tea facilitates dynamic exchanges that spark fresh thinking and collective momentum, helping groups rapidly explore multiple viewpoints, break free from conventional patterns, and co-create a shared foundation for moving forward with clarity and purpose.
Mad Tea
What is made possible - What it unlocks
Mad Tea quickly provokes deeper reflections and strategic insights among group members. Through rapid succession the energy of a social gathering is created while focusing attention on tough strategic questions (e.g., If we do nothing, the worst thing that can happen for us is…). In a seriously fun way, Mad Tea unlocks spontaneous connection and cross-pollination of ideas—participants break out of usual patterns, discover unexpected insights through serendipitous conversations, and develop a shared understanding of strategic options and next steps.
When to use it
- At the start of a multi-day event or workshop to help participants get to know each other quickly
- When you want to energize a group that’s been sitting too long or feels stuck
- To generate diverse perspectives on a challenge or question before diving into deeper work
- When you want to bring more life and passion to strategy making sessions
- To enhance reflections, insights, and imagination through rapid exchanges
- When you need to reveal essential qualities and intuitive responses without overthinking
- To strip away artifice and political correctness, producing simple, graspable statements
- When you want to create magical off-balance moments that open gateways to intuitive thinking
- To help participants empty their minds of assumptions and see situations more clearly
🛠️ The five design elements of Mad Tea
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 finish a set of open sentences (prompts) that relate to shaping their next steps together
The arrangement of space and which tools or resources are needed to support interaction.
- Area big enough to let participants stand face-to-face in pairs in two concentric circles
- Clear signal for timing (bell, chime, or music to indicate rotation)
- Slides to project prompts for each round (download free worksheet for example sets of prompts below)
- For virtual sessions: breakout rooms that rotate automatically or manually
- Optional: Use the Strategy Questions Worksheet (see worksheet below)
Who gets a voice and how everyone is actively included in the process.
- Everyone has an equal opportunity to contribute
- Each person speaks and listens in every round
How people are arranged (alone, small groups, or all together) and how this shifts during the activity.
- In pairs for each sentence, switching one place to the right as each new sentence appears
- Works with groups of 12-100+ participants
- 30-60 seconds for transition between rounds
The step-by-step flow of the activity and the time given to each step to keep energy and focus.
- Ask everyone in the group to form two concentric circles and find one other person, standing directly across from them, face to face (2 min)
- Describe the rules succinctly: in very short order, one person completes the sentence on the screen while the other expresses keen interest and curiosity and then switch roles (2 min)
- Invite one person in each pair to finish prompt # 1 first , ding the bells once at 30 seconds, then invite the other to do the same
- Ding the bells twice at 1 minute, remind participants to move one spot to the right (you will not have to remind them after a few rounds)
- Repeat step 3 & 4 for each additional prompt -up to 15 total (12-20 min)
- Ask, what did you notice about the Mad Tea experience? (2-5 min)
- Optional: Invite participants to silently complete the Strategy Questions Worksheet (below) (5 min)
Total time: 20-30 minutes
Online version
Adapted for virtual use, with the same impact
The online version is a bit different. Everything takes place in the main room, where you’ll use the chat for a Chat Storm:
- Tell the open sentence (prompt) and typ it in the chat (if possible show it in your digital background).
- Let the participants typ their reactions to the prompt, BUT let them wait with pressing ENTER.
- After 30 seconds start counting down. 3… 2… 1… and let them press ENTER
- Now a storm of reactions pop up. Let people take it in shortly by just watching the answers appear (don’t dive into answers)
- Repeat with the next prompts
- After all the prompts invite participants to scroll back and scan the answers.
- Reflect and share what stood out, using 1-2-4-All (with breakout room) or in the main room
Total time: 20-30 minutes
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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. Strategy Questions inspired by Chris McGoff (The Primes).
Note: As a Liberating Structure in Development, Mad Tea hasn’t been tested in all possible scenarios and doesn’t always deliver predictable results yet. This simply means it’s still being refined through practice and feedback from facilitators worldwide.
Equal Participation
Structured rotation ensures every voice is heard, preventing dominant personalities from monopolizing conversation and building genuine collective intelligence.
Pattern Recognition
Encountering strategic questions through multiple lenses in quick succession helps participants identify recurring themes and opportunities that traditional discussions might miss.
Context Switching
Moving between conversation partners activates associative thinking and prevents cognitive fixation, reframing familiar challenges in unexpected ways.
Embodied Cognition
Physical movement between rounds activates the mind-body connection, enhancing memory formation and breaking mental fatigue from prolonged sitting.
Riffs and Variations
Start with creative constraints to learn this structure and then... go liberate yourself and try some variations.
- Insert different open sentences depending on the topic: Customize prompts to match your context. For lighter topics, adjust the tone accordingly. For example, here is a string developed by Fisher Qua for a team working to improve their performance: I hope to get…from today’s session. I know a team is dysfunctional when…. I contribute to this dysfunction by…. Working on ineffective teams makes me…. …often prevents teams from working well together. A team I worked on that overcame these challenges was…. A practice or behavior we implemented was….
- Mad Tea Gallery: Combine with visual artifacts or prototypes that groups discuss at each station
- Virtual Mad Tea: Use breakout room shuffling in video platforms, with slightly longer rounds (2-3 min)
- Virtual “chat to all”: Use “chat to all” within virtual conferencing technology—it can be lively and fun with hundreds of participants simultaneously sharing responses
Tips
Lessons learned from other facilitators.
- Keep rounds extremely short—20 to 50 seconds per person maintains urgency and prevents overthinking
- Invite listeners to give their complete attention to their partner’s answers, practicing deep presence
- Adjust timing for different questions—some prompts need slightly more or less time depending on complexity
- Mad Tea can get very loud—make sure you have loud bells or another signal that everyone can easily notice
- Encourage equal airtime—remind pairs to switch roles at the halfway point so both voices are heard
- Create space after for reflection—give participants a moment to capture insights before moving on
Traps
Don't make the same mistakes.
- Allowing rounds to run too long—conversations lose their electric quality when there’s too much time
- Choosing overly complex or sensitive prompts—Mad Tea works best with questions that spark immediate responses
- Skipping the clear invitation about listening—without this, people may not engage deeply with their partners
- Trying to control the energy—Mad Tea is meant to be loud and chaotic; embrace it rather than fight it
- Not adapting for your space—in large or noisy venues, you need even stronger signals and may need to slow transitions slightly
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:
- Impromptu Networking as a warm-up to get people moving and talking before diving into Mad Tea
- 1-2-4-All after Mad Tea to deepen and synthesize insights from the rapid conversations
- What, So What, Now What? (W3) to make sense of patterns and themes that emerged during Mad Tea
- Wise Crowds to quickly gather diverse input that was sparked during Mad Tea conversations
- Troika Consulting as a follow-up when specific challenges surfaced during Mad Tea
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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Mad Tea
Playfully expand the scope for reflections, insights and actions.
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