Ok, I’m going to share this like no one has ever thought of it before.

The other day, I was giving a lightning talk at Utah Software Craftsmanship about how I run bi-weekly team meetings with Lean Coffee. In short, I highly recommend the practice. It helps keep our meetings quick and on-task. Succinct really.

People seem to like it because we discuss the most important things, and we usually finish early.

If you aren’t allowing your meetings to end on time or early– use this opportunity to rethink your life. You don’t want to sell anyone death-sticks.

Back to the lightning talk. I spoke for about three of my five allotted minutes and opened up the floor for questions. There were a few, but the most interesting question by far (paraphrased) was this:

How do you get people to arrive at desisions when running a meeting with Lean Coffee?

The query took me by surprise.

For a moment, I considered decisions that came out of our meetings. Granted, there weren’t a ton. Often these sessions are more informational. Sometimes they result in questions I don’t have an answer to, so I take to-do items and communicate back to the team later.

However, we did reach decisions. We planned a team party, for example. For these types of situations, I looked for a majority consensus. Often, we found ourselves using a technique I will now dub “Lean Teatime”.

Lean Teatime

Lean Teatime is a subset of Lean Coffee. It can be run either in the middle of a lean coffee session, or completely separate from it. The gist is simple:

Set expectations by making clear the intent of the Lean Tea session (e.g. selecting a venue for a team party). Make sure everyone has access to Post-It notes and Sharpies (the tools of any agile facilitator). Set a timer (2-5 minutes) and have the group come up with as many ideas as possible. They will write each thought on an individual Post-It. Organize similar items into groups and stick them to a desk (or wall for bigger groups). Give everyone groups/3 dot votes and turn them loose to place dots on the item groups they prefer. Allow one dot per group or multiple, your choice (I prefer 1 per). Order the results from most votes to least. In the event of a tie for first, vote one more time with the two tied items only. I like to do a fist of five at this point to see if anyone just hates the thing that ended up on top. In this case, I’ll ask the group to offer mitigation suggestions.

All of this only takes a few minutes and usually has a positive result.

So there you have it. The “genesis” of Lean Teatime. I hope you find it useful.

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