A way to come to decisions fast, when time is not on your side.

Sometimes time is not on your side. Your team is busy building features, but the discussions around how we build and with what are building up.

My CTO coaching mentor, Joel Chippindale, once introduced me to a technique called lean coffee - a structured but agenda-less meeting. For the CTO circle I was participating in it worked incredibly well for ensuring we each got to speak about the topics that were important to us and that we were invested in what others had to say.

So I decided to implement a variant of it within my teams.

What is Lean Coffee?

With lean coffee participants gather, build an agenda together, and begin talking. After five minutes, the organiser interrupts the group and asks everyone to vote thumbs up/down on whether to continue discussing or move to the next priority topic. If majority votes to continue, you get another shorter time duration.

How we use Lean Coffee

To be the most time efficient for our team I've been trialling a slight variation on lean coffee which works as follows:

• We schedule a regular team meeting
• 24 hours before the session, the organiser asks participants to propose suggestions on what they wish to discuss on a Slack thread
• Participants are also asked to place emojis next to those they feel strongly about
• Shortly before the session, the organiser orders the topics by number of emojis
• The session begins and follows the usual lean coffee structure:
  • Each topic gets a timebox (5 minutes)
  • If the topic doesn't naturally conclude before 5 mins, we vote thumbs up/thumbs down on whether to continue
• The aim is to have an action/resolution to each item

The Results

So far it has been working incredibly well for us. It has helped us make a lot of rapid decisions on the way we work without requiring a lot of time from the team.

Lean Coffee turns control back over to the attendees of the meeting; it reduces the ability for one person to dominate the conversation and it ensures the team are able to talk about the topics that matter to them - which means their ownership, accountability and engagement has also improved.

Give lean coffee a try!