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What Is Lean Coffee Table?

Lean Coffee Table helps distributed teams to run effective 'agenda-less' 'Lean Coffee'™ meetings. Lean Coffee™ is a wonderfully simple idea developed by Jim Benson and Jeremy Lightsmith. Check out leancoffee.org for more on their ideas and guidelines on running an effective session.

Whilst nothing can improve upon a Lean Coffee™ around a physical table – we want to enable distributed teams to be able to conduct these rapid and effective conversations.

How it works

Setting up a board

  1. Subscription holders can set up a Lean Coffee™ and invite attendees by email
  2. Participants click on the email link in the invitation and can add topics they would like to discuss to the board

Running the Lean Coffee™

  1. The person who set up the board facilitates the session
  2. Each participant writes the topics they want the meeting to consider discussing
  3. Attendees vote on the topics they would like to discuss
  4. Topics are ranked by the number of votes and moved into the 'To Discuss' column
  5. The facilitator selects a topic, moves this to the 'Discussing' column and starts the timer
  6. Once the allotted time is up, participants decide if they want to continue discussing the topic by clicking on the 'thumbs up' or 'thumbs down' buttons
  7. If there are more 'ups' than 'downs' then the facilitator restarts the timer and the discussion continues. If not, the group moves onto another topic chosen from the 'To Discuss' column
  8. This continues until the end of the timebox, typically 45 – 60 minutes.
  9. During the session, the facilitators may add actions to each topic card
  10. Once the session has finished the facilitator may export the actions and download a summary report detailing the session attendees, the topics discussed and associated actions.
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Origins of Lean Coffee Table

We use Lean Coffee™ at our clients and have found it to be a great way to have energised, effective discussions on the topics that are piquing the interest of the people that happen to be around the table at that moment.

We tried to do Lean Coffee™ for our weekly 'RippleRock Sync' meeting, where our consultants dial in from different locations, mostly home, on a Friday. We tried other tools, like Lync and Skype and found that they got in the way of a seamless experience – so we decided to write our own applications which evolved rapidly to become Lean Coffee Table.

Rory Street wrote Lean Coffee Table and would love to hear your thoughts and suggested improvements.