Lean Coffee

Lean Coffee provides a simple and flexible framework for a discussion intended to identify and deal with the problems a team encounters in their daily work. More specifically, the workshop consists of suggesting topics, selecting the most important ones, and brainstorming ideas for improvement.

The term “coffee” reflects the angle of approach of the workshop, which consists of putting the participants in a comfortable, almost informal situation to relax them and encourage them to share the problems they are thinking about.

The Lean Coffee workshop generally takes place in 4 stages:

1. Step 1: Proposal of topics

   The first step is to come up with topics for discussion. Participants think separately for 5 to 10 minutes, for example, using the polling booth mode. The participants mustn’t influence each other but feel free to share the topics that are important to them.

2. Step 2: Selecting the most important topic

   Once all the proposals have been revealed, as a facilitator or a Scrum Master, it may be useful to group specific proposals by theme or reformulate them to avoid redundancy and prevent any ambiguity.

   Once this sorting and grouping work has been carried out, the participants are asked, for example, in the form of a voting session, to select the subject that seems to them the most important to deal with.

3. Step 3: Discussion on the selected topic

   Once the subject has been selected, discuss it in a group for 5 to 10 minutes to bring out ideas for improvement. These ideas are then listed in the dedicated section of the template.

    

   It is essential to constrain the discussion in time, for example, using a timer, to frame the exchanges and prevent them from turning into sterile debates.

4. Step 4: Continuation the discussion or move on to the next topic

   At the end of the allotted time, the participants are again asked to decide whether to allow themselves another 5 to 10 minutes of discussion around the same subject or move on to the next subject.

    

   In the second case, you return either to step 2 to select the next subject if it has not been decided initially or directly to step 3 if the following subject has already been identified.