Lean Coffee

Lean Coffee and Agenda-less Meetings

Welcome back and Happy New Year! I hope 2023 has started well for you and you’re excited for the year ahead. Next week, we have some big announcements to make, but to keep you going until then we’re going to dive into a great psychologically safe meeting practice.

In this issue, we’re discussing a way to run effective, agenda-less meetings, which helps to foster psychologically safe environments by ensuring everyone has the opportunity to speak up.

You may have heard of Lean (as in Lean Manufacturing), and you’ve almost certainly heard of coffee, but what is Lean Coffee?

Lean Coffee started in Seattle in 2009 when Jim Benson and Jeremy Lightsmith wanted to create a group to discuss Lean techniques but didn’t want to start a whole new cumbersome committee or heavyweight meeting. They wanted to create something that didn’t rely on anything other than people showing up and getting involved.

Lean Coffee is really easy to facilitate and is one of my favourite ways of running psychologically safe, agenda-less, engaging meetings with almost any number of attendees. The “agenda” is created in the meeting itself, by the attendees. Every step of a Lean Coffee meeting is time-boxed, with the option to extend as necessary. This maintains the “Lean” aspect, by ensuring that the meeting doesn’t derail, or dive too deep into a topic. Lean Coffee sessions require a chair or facilitator who simply manages timing and may introduce topics or record actions. Here’s a  Lean Coffee Canvas to use for your own sessions.

The essential Lean Coffee steps are below:

1. Introduce the practice to all the attendees and confirm who is going to act as chair for the session.
2. Gather all the possible topics. Ask everyone to come up with topics they’d like to discuss. If the meeting is about a particular theme (e.g. psychological safety), these are likely to be aspects of that theme, but it could be wide open, with any topic up for discussion (which can be an effective team meeting practice). You can gather the ideas in advance, or at the start of the meeting, setting a time limit of 3-5 minutes. You may wish to ensure the creator of the topic remains anonymous, or it might not be a concern. There probably won’t be time to discuss every topic, so the next step is important.
3. Aggregate and remove duplicate topics. A time limit of a couple of minutes would be appropriate.
4. Prioritise the topics for discussion. Applying the Pareto principle (the 80/20 rule, that 80% of the value is in 20% of the work), we want to collectively surface the most important topics. We do this via voting: each attendee has a limited number of votes (usually 3-5), and places votes on the topics they feel are most important to discuss. They may spend all their votes on a single topic if they wish to. A short time limit, of a minute or two, is probably best here. Then order the topics from most-voted to least-voted.
5. Discussion time! Set a timer of 3-5 minutes and begin discussing the most voted-for topic. You may ask for the person who wrote the topic to introduce it, or have the chair do so. When the timer is up, take a quick thumbs-up or thumbs-down vote whether or not to continue on the topic. If the consensus is to continue, reset the timer and continue the process until the consensus is to move on to the next one.
6. Consider having someone record minutes or actions, depending on the aim of the meeting. Alternatively you might invite people to make their own notes.
7. Wrap up! Allow a few minutes at the end of the meeting for a wrap-up, or even a mini retrospective on the meeting, so that it can be even better next time.

All the above can be done easily in-person with some pens, post-it notes and a timer, but if you’re meeting virtually, you might want to use a tool for the meeting such as Jamboard, Miro, Mural or something else. I love the excellent Lean Coffee Table app, which is designed specifically for the job, and it’s what I use regularly for Lean Coffee sessions.

In fact, if you’d like to experience it, take part, and join us for a discussion, I’m hosting an Open Lean Coffee on the theme of psychological safety on Monday 23rd January at 11am UK time. Register here!

Lean Coffee is a great way to run team meetings, planning sessions, retrospectives, community groups and meetups, or almost any other group session. It’s also a great practice for folks who are neurodiverse, or anyone else who prefers to have well-established rules of engagement in a meeting.

I’m interested to hear how you get on, so please let me know if you try it out!

This newsletter is sponsored by Conflux

Conflux is the leading business consultancy worldwide helping organizations to navigate fast flow in software. We help organizations to adopt and sustain proven, modern practices for delivering software rapidly and safely.

‘The Fearless Organization’ by Amy Edmondson is considered by many to be essential reading on the topic of psychological safety. In this article, Sophie Weston, Principal at Conflux, has put together some key takeaways from the book.

Psychological Safety in the Workplace

Check out this episode of Agile Table Topics with Omar McNeil, who was kind enough to invite Tim Beattie of Stellafai and myself over to talk about Agile, DevOps and Psychological safety. Omar asked us:

1. Are you providing probability distributions to set expectations, why and why not?
2. How do you do the fine dance between meeting the team where they are at and getting them to follow the framework?
3. Was the second Death Star an Agile project, why?
4. How have you seen Knowledge Centered Services (KCS) successfully implemented while developing an Agile environment?
5. What’s the best retrospective format you’ve ever used and why was it effective? 

This was a great discussion, and I had a fantastic time learning from Omar and Tim.

Here’s an interesting article in The Washington Post: Incentives can lead employees to cheat or lie at work. I like this insight from Bill Becker, Associate Professor of Management at Virginia Tech, who points out that companies often “incentivise one thing and hope for something else,” and that “money brings out the worst in people, and it almost never brings out their best.” Deming and many others have made the point that extrinsic motivation is rarely as effective as intrinsic motivation, and incentives usually result in unintended and counterproductive consequences. What’s interesting in this piece is the suggestion, by Tae-Youn Park, that team-based incentives can result in more unethical behaviour than individual targets. Park’s original research paper, Incentive Effects on Ethics, is here (sorry, not open access).

Dyslexic Disclaimers

This is a great idea, shared by Kate Halpin on Linkedin: dyslexia disclaimers on email signatures. Made by Dyslexia have some fab suggestions on their website which can be added to your email signature such as:

I’m #MadeByDyslexia
I’m #MadeByDyslexia – expect creative thinking & creative spelling.
I’m #MadeByDyslexia – expect big thinking & small typos.
I’m #MadeByDyslexia – expect curious ideas & curious spelling.

There are loads of other great resources on the Made By Dyslexia website, and worth checking out.

This week’s poem:

When I Am Gone, by Shel Silverstein

When I am gone what will you do?
Who will write and draw for you?
Someone smarter—someone new?
Someone better—maybe YOU!



Thanks to Amy Hoy for the poet suggestion 🙂