Focusing of what we really need to talk about with Lean Coffee

Lean Coffee is a technique for facilitating discussions that help us focus on discussing what we actually want, and therefore need to discuss. It's been running for many years and was originally thought of as a way of structuring agendaless meet-ups. Mike has used it many times in formal and informal work environments, in the corporate and non-corporate worlds and finds it a great way to help teams discussion what they really wish to.

In this session, we'll cover what Lean Coffee is and how Mike has used it in the various orgaisations he's worked in, for non-structured organising, through to running retrospectives. Focusing on various lessons learned, we'll cover how to approach it, how it works, and then spend a goodly chunk of the session putting it into practice and discussing between breakout groups the pertinent topics of the evening that we're collectively keen to talk about. Then we'll run a mini-retro at the end to see how it all went.

https://leancoffee.org (like all great websites, it's a little out of date, but gives the general idea)

Mike Harris has been working in the software engineering and IT industry for over 35 years and has a wealth of experience in all aspects from climbing under desks doing desktop PC support, through mob programming Go in high-performance software development teams, through to delivering on-site Internet connectivity at major festivals and public events, through to managing software and data engineering teams in corporate environments. He's also a musician and lives on a narrowboat since the beginning of 2025. He's been a co-organiser of Agile Oxford since 2018.

https://mbharris.co.uk . https://xtreamlab.net . https://hacktionlab.org