What is Lean Coffee?

I have facilitated countless retrospectives, and one of my dependable favorites is lean coffee. This technique works especially well for remote teams, as it provides a great visual tool to see the agenda and the current topic being discussed.  True lean coffee always starts with folks proposing topics and “pitching” them to the rest of the group.  Then there is a voting round, with a few votes per person, to decide on the priority order for discussion topics. Lean Coffee is also a great way to dynamically create an agenda on the fly, if you are in a working group or project setting and not sure what discuss in a given meeting time.

Application for Retrospectives

My current client has two fully co-located teams working on one product, and I wanted to with them on how they could make their scrum ceremonies more effective. This is what I call a “topical” or “themed” retrospective, where instead of focusing on the previous sprint in general terms, we use the sprint retrospective to do a deep dive on a particular topic or pain point for the team.  In that way, the team can really get to the root of some tough problems, and identify solutions.  So, we discussed as a group how we would use the retrospective time to discuss effective meetings. Both of these teams have been working through working agreements, team rules and protocols. I thought a lean coffee would be the best way to generate ideas and then decide what is important.

How I like to Use It

When I use the Lean Coffee for a retrospective or a working session, I like to present the idea to the meeting participants of a definition of done for the done column.  My definition of done is that an action item must be added to the working agreement or someone must take ownership and execute then report back to the team.

For this particular event, we really wanted to focus on working agreements to make the team’s meetings more effective. I decided to use a check-in at the beginning to to reflect on the question “Where are we with our team working agreement?” I served as the scribe, jotting down a few ideas on stickies and used them a batch of “seed topics” to the far left.  This was my way of helping to capture ideas while they were fresh, that may not be written down later.  Once we got to the propose topics, participants could select from the seed topics or propose their own.

A Final Though on Collaboration

For the first round of discussion on each topic, do very little. This is where you can really show your skill in the art of facilitation.  With one of these two teams in particular, it was painful how reticent they were to speak on any particular topic.  Yet, but staying silent and just listening to noticing the dialogue in the room, the team became more adept at sharing turns in the conversation.

In the famous study at Google regarding effective teams, Project Aristotle, the researchers discovered that the most important attribute for high performing teams way psychological safety. One aspect of this characteristic that they identified was equality in distribution of conversational turn taking. Or, put another way, on the most effective teams, each team member speaks in a meeting roughly the same amount as the others.  This is the hallmark of a truly collaborative team — every voice is engaged and heard.  By allowing team members to speak and creating a container where new voices could be heard, this team is starting to learn crucial skills for collaboration.

 

Until the Next Iteration . . .

Jason