Lean Coffee at a glance
How much time have you wasted in meetings? Wouldn’t it be great to eliminate some of the waste (and get your time back)?
Lean Coffee is a structured, but agenda-less meeting. Participants gather, build an agenda, and begin talking. Conversations are directed and productive because the agenda for the meeting was democratically generated.
How it works
Meet
- Agree on a time, place, and goal to discuss
- Set a timebox for the event
- Find a wall, board, or virtual canvas
Discover
- Take a few minutes to collect items of discussion – one item per card.
- Put each card on your canvas
- Group like topics
Dot Vote
- Assign each participant a total number of votes
- Allow all participants to simultaneously place a dot on a card. Each dot indicates a vote, or interest, in the topic.
- Multiple dots on one card is OK, but each participant is only allowed to use the assigned total number of votes on all cards
Discuss
- Line up all the cards, most votes first, then next most votes, and so on
- Pick the most popular card to discuss.
- Pick a timebox for this topic
- Discuss this topic within the timebox
- When the timebox expires, pick the next topic.
- Optional: you can decide as a group to keep the discussion going for this topic within another timebox
- Keep discussing topics until the event timebox expires
