Mad Tea Party

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After I encountered this structure at a LS meet-up, it became an instant favorite.

In practice

I like Mad Tea for check-in and check-out activities in online workshops. If it’s a multi-day affair, I’ll turn it into a ritual and change up the prompts.

I haven’t had the opportunity to run it in an in-person environment yet.

Facilitation notes

In a consulting context, after we’ve gone through the prompts, I ask my client contact or a senior-but-not-highest-ranking person who understands the project context to walk us through the responses and share their observations. This person is able to be very specific about contextualizing the responses to feed the objective of the workshop. They might take the opportunity to amplify a brave or insightful comment, or show appreciation to an unexpected comment from a particular stakeholder.

For a community or internal workshop, I’ll interject quips about what I’m seeing or highlight a particularly unique response before moving onto the next prompt. This is not an invitation for others to do the same. It’s key in both scenarios to maintain a fast-paced rhythm.

Workshop design notes

There’s an art in designing the sequence of prompts, and I leave it open until I have a feel for the room.

Mad Tea Party, as a check-out activity, is an excellent opportunity to call for some kind of commitment to post-workshop actions. It is typically the last prompt, following a sequence of reflective prompts. The wording is a delicate matter because we cannot assume that all participants will take action - or maybe we can but it’s not an external facilitator’s place to elicit its public declaration. The prompt should be neutral and open. I like to rattle off a few examples to signal safety in responding in different levels of specificity. This would be the only prompt that I’d make sure to validate with the client contact before running it in the workshop. Again, the way it’s posed is very contextual to the organizational environment.

When sharing the workshop deck with participants afterward, I copy the responses from the chat and port them to the slides with each prompt. It’s a great way to capture the sentiment of the audience and a key source of reference in the workshop retro.

This entry is part of Liberating Structures Field Notes, my collection of stories and reflections from the field. It's written for people who already know LS and are deepening their practice. If you're just getting started and looking for activity instructions, you'll find them at liberatingstructures.com..