Learning about lean coffee ☕, brainstorming, creativity and collaboration 👯

Lean Coffee is essentially a structured, yet flexible meeting method where participants create the agenda at the beginning and then time-box discussions.

 

This is how it works:

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👯‍♂️ Gather input: Everyone comes together (physically or virtually).

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📱 Suggest topics: Participants write topics they want to talk about on sticky notes or post them to the Napkin board.

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🗃️ Grouping: the moderator 'stacks' the topics by discussing them one by one very quickly and asking questions to the participants. This creates structure in the topics and makes the board clear.

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🗣️ Pitching: each participant pitches her or his topic very briefly.

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👍 Voting: everyone votes on the topics they find most interesting.

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🥅 Prioritize: the topics are arranged in order of most votes.

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 🧏‍♂️  Discuss: Start discussing the top topic within a set time. When the time is up, the group decides whether they want to move on to the next time box or move on to the next topic.

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🔄 Repeat: the group continues with the next topics on the board, following the same procedure, until all topics have been discussed.

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Lean Coffee facilitates democratic, inclusive conversations and ensures that the most valuable topics for the group are discussed - and decided! Lean coffee is a 'lean method' and is often used in so-called agile projects.