A way to facilitate open-ended remote meetings using Lean Coffee

"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." —LeanCoffee.org

Lean Coffee is one of my favorite ways to hold a meeting. It works well especially well for regular community of practice discussions ("us Product Owners are getting together to talk shop") or cross-functional check-ins ("let's get together as a whole team and talk about what's most important to all of us").

Lean Coffee in Brief

Building an Agenda

A Lean Coffee agenda is built in three steps in which every participant:

1. Proposes one or more topics of discussion synchronously using sticky notes on a wall.
2. Reads the list of topics, asks clarifying questions, and deduplicates topics by putting like sticky notes together.
3. Spends two "votes" on the one or two topics they'd most like to talk about.

The facilitator then rank-orders the topics by vote count descending. This becomes the agenda for our meeting.

Executing the Agenda

1. The facilitator starts a timer—ideally universally visible but at least universally audible—for 3-5 minutes.
2. Start talking about the topic. Pro-tip: use these "stack" and "C" hand signals to keep track of who is speaking next.
3. When the timer goes off, let the person who is speaking wrap up their thought. Then, everyone should quickly signal thumbs up (keep talking about this), thumbs down (move on), or thumbs sideways (don't care). The facilitator then decides whether to move on to move on to the next topic.

Hint: Usually a general sense is fine with an opportunity for dissent is fine. The facilitator might say, "I'm mostly seeing thumbs down, some sideways, and a couple of thumbs up. Would anyone strongly object to us moving on?"

The Result

You can schedule a Lean Coffee for whenever you think a group of people might have something to talk about, need to be mindful of using people's time effectively, and still want to have flexibility in your agenda.

The result of the collaborative agenda-building process is that the most important topics rise to the top and get discussed.

The result of the timed discussion is that we remain aware of the passing of time and can usually avoid belaboring a topic for too long. It also subtly encourages long-winded speakers to be more concise.

How to do this via video

Lean Coffee was originally intended for in-person discussions, but it adapts quite well to hybrid and fully-remote discussions with online tools.

Create a board with the tool of your choice

Ideaboardz (free, no signup required): Create a board at Ideaboardz.com with just one section: "Topics." Note: Ideaboardz.com works fine for Chrome, Brave, and Firefox, but doesn't seem to work for Safari (the user can't see any topics).

Google Docs, HackMD, or similar: A real-time collaborative document (Google Docs, HackMD, etc) also works, but they don't always provide for anonymity and voting is a little harder. Add one bulleted list item for each topic and deduplicate simply by cutting and pasting text from one bullet to another other. You can vote by prefixing a topic with *'s. Manually sort the bulleted list by the count of asterisks when you're ready to build your agenda.

It doesn't really matter what the tool is so long as people can write topics, vote on topics, and then see topics by the vote count. I use Ideaboardz.com with my team because it's free, anonymous, doesn't require registration, and allows easy voting. On the other hand, it doesn't work with Safari and sometimes people accidentally vote twice. If you've know of a better tool—especially a free one that doesn't require registration—please let me know in the comments.

Populate the board with topics

Send a the link to your tool of choice and allow 3-5 minutes for people to populate the Topics section with things they'd like to talk about. You can also do this in advance. Discourage voting: because this step comes later. (You can't undo a vote in Ideaboardz, but you can copy the text, create a new card, and delete the old one.)

Read, clarify, and de-dupe

Allow 3-5 minutes for people to read, ask questions about, and deduplicate the topics. In Ideaboardz, just drag one card on top of the other to merge them.

Vote

Allow 3 minutes for people to vote on topics they'd like to talk about. Participants can distribute their votes any way they like, but encourage early voting to avoid over-thinking and gaming the vote. If there are about 9 topics allow 3 votes, 16 topics allow 4 votes, 25 topics allow 5 votes, 36 topics allow 6 votes, basically the rounded square root of the number of topics.

In Ideaboardz, click on the card, then the "thumbs up" icon. Wait to see "Updated" before you click again to avoid double-voting.

Sort topics by vote to discover your agenda

Sort the topics by the number of votes descending. If you are using 10 sections in Ideaboardz, you can take the top 9 topics and put them in their corresponding section.

Discuss your topics in order

As with the in-person Lean Coffee, Start a timer, universally audible, for 3-5 minutes and begin chatting about the topic. I like to keep my phone loud and next to my microphone so that everyone can hear it. This makes the phone responsible for the interruption instead of me as the host. These "stack," "C," and other hand signals are even more important on video, too.

When the timer goes off, vote and keep talking, or move on to the next topic. Repeat this step until you run out of time or topics. Allow at least 5 minutes at the end to retrospect and close the session. You could even build in a little unstructured social time so you can stay more connected with one another.

Give this a shot and let me know what you discover! Please share this article if you find it useful.