The tool I want to share on this Toolbox Tuesday is Lean Coffee.
Lean Coffee is great to have in your toolbox for meetings where others are bringing topics to discuss and you don’t have all day. But you want to talk about the most important things and come out with actionable steps.
The key to Lean Coffee’s success is that it enables a structured conversation. It eliminates the risk of spending all meeting talking about 1-2 topics, brought up by the loudest people on the call. It can be done in-person or virtually with equal effectiveness.
Here’s how it works:
1> Give the people in your meeting 5 minutes to write topic ideas on post its (real or virtual) and place them on a board (real or virtual like Milo). One topic per post it.
2>Give everyone 3 minutes to look at all the topics and vote on their top 5 they would like to discuss. Have them mark the ones they want with voting dots (real or virtual).
3>Tally up the votes and move the top vote getters and ties to another part of the board, the topic backlog. The number moved to the backlog depends on the time available in the session.
4>If there are more than three topics in a tie take a re-vote just for the ties and place them into the correct order per the vote.
5>Discuss each topic for 8 minutes and then take a quick thumbs-up or thumbs-down vote to see if the group wants to extend the time by 4 more minutes, or move onto the next topic.
6>Any one topic cannot be discussed beyond 12 minutes. If you need more time place it onto a Parking Lot so a separate meeting can be scheduled.
7>Move the completed topic post-it to the Discussed backlog and move onto the next topic after that one is done.
8>During topic discussion, have people take notes of action items and points of interest from the conversation and place them on the whiteboard.
9>Continue through this process until all selected topics have been discussed or you run out of time. Make sure to leave at least 10 minutes for wrap-up.
10>In wrap-up, identify all action items and assign someone to each one. Also go around the call and ask everyone to share one take-away of what they felt was most interesting.
If you have a large group (larger than 6-8 people), you can also split people into breakout rooms for these discussions.
You can learn more online about Lean Coffee, ask a question below, or reach out to me in DM. The facilitation is rather straightforward in this event, keep things moving, keep time, and make sure to finish strong as shown.
Have you experienced a Lean Coffee? What did you think?
