The real agenda is never the one that's announced.
Recognize this situation? Below are the Liberating Structures that change it — a concrete example, and the reason this one fits here. New to Liberating Structures? Here's what it is.
Wicked Questions surfaces the tension no one dares name out loud.
For example: The agenda says "discuss quarterly planning." Everyone knows the real question is whether the two team leads can still work in the same room — but nobody puts that on the invite. The meeting dutifully covers the quarterly numbers. It's only afterward, over coffee, that the real conversation happens.
Liberating Structures for this situation:
Options Place
Options Place solves this by opening up the agenda itself: instead of one person deciding in advance what the meeting is about, participants propose the sessions they actually need.
Whoever's worried about the tension between the team leads can simply put that topic on the board themselves — no one has to "dare" to add it as an agenda item. The hidden agenda gets a legitimate spot instead of staying underground.
Wicked Questions
Wicked Questions takes a different approach: instead of opening up the agenda, it makes the tension itself discussable as a paradox.
Important: the facilitator doesn't invent the question — each participant first writes down two truths in tension on their own (e.g. "we're approving the quarterly plan" and "we don't know if the team can deliver on it"), then turns that into a Wicked Question using the fixed template: "How can we be ___ while at the same time being ___?"
You know you've got a good Wicked Question by the reaction: if the group lets out an "argh!", you've nailed it. No one can read a question like that as an attack, since it just describes what everyone already sees.
Especially useful when the problem isn't one concrete fact but an unspoken tension between what's said and what's done.
No certification, no lengthy prep — read the steps and try it at your next meeting.