For over six years now, the New York City Lean Kanban Meetup group has met at a coffee shop in Manhattan. Our purpose is to give our community an opportunity to share challenges and solutions with each other, and especially to teach each other how to achieve better flow in our work.
Our meetings tend to be small, only four or five people, and content-rich. The key to our meetings’ effectiveness has been the way we run our meetings using a process called Lean Coffee.
What is Lean Coffee?
Lean Coffee is a lightly structured way to let participants create a meeting’s agenda. The attendees propose topics to discuss by writing them down on sticky notes, then everybody votes on the topics they want to discuss by drawing a dot on the ones they’re most interested in.
The conversation begins with the most popular topic and every five minutes everybody votes (👍or 👎) on whether to continue with the topic or move on to a new one. As the conversation goes on, attendees write their insights on sticky notes and add them to the table; this creates a record of what we learned.
If you‘re lazy (like me), it’s a great way to run a Meetup event because you don‘t have to come up with an agenda or speaker every time you want to meet, and if your attendees are smart (like mine) then they bring a lot of interesting things to talk about. For my group, members usually bring challenges from their work as Scrum Masters or Agile Coaches, and are looking for help from their peers in overcoming them.
Hosting Lean Coffee online
The shift to remote work gave my community a lot of new challenges to deal with, and social distancing made the need for connection even more important, particularly for my members who have lost their jobs due to the pandemic.
Even though we couldn’t meet face to face once social distancing became the norm, I knew we had to find a way to continue meeting.
Lean Coffee is very tactile, and in person we rely a lot on non-verbal communication during conversations. Now we use two software programs to enable virtual Lean Coffee: Zoom (surprise!) and Trello. Attendees suggest and vote on topics in Trello, and add their insights to it.
Zoom enables face-to-face communication, but as an organizer I have to take a more proactive approach to keep the conversation going. In video calls, it’s harder for some introverted people to find space to speak up, and it can also be difficult for talkers to notice they’re dominating the conversation.
The future of Lean Coffee
I’ve found that people need to connect with each other, now more than ever. And while I can’t wait until it’s safe to have face-to-face Meetup events again, I’m glad that I’ve been able to connect with people who couldn’t easily make it to in-person meetings before.
Since the meetings are online, people can join in from around the world. Since we went virtual, we’ve been able to expand beyond the New York City metro area, and have attendees join in from other parts of the US, as well as Serbia, Germany, Singapore, Costa Rica, and Turkey.
Lean Coffee is a light process, and it’s worth doing since it’s so good at helping strangers get to know each other really quickly. Sometimes, though, you can just skip it and have a conversation. Recently, I had a meeting where only 4 people showed up. It was a joy. We had a freewheeling conversation, without any structure at all, and four people from different parts of the country got to know each other a little better at a time when that’s a lot harder than usual.
Connect with your community online and in person, start a tech group on Meetup.
Last modified on June 23, 2021
