Hey, Meg, let's do a podcast.

That's a great idea. What should we talk about?

This one's going to come a little bit from left field, right? Like, we just know this. We're going to have some fun here because the other day when you and I, Meg were brainstorming about topics for the podcast, I slipped up and typed learn coffee instead of lean coffee. So, yeah, learn coffee. Super interesting. But I don't think we can go there until we talk about lean coffee. So what's lean coffee? And is coffee involved?

Yeah, unfortunately. Megan, I hate to break it to you, but there's no coffee in lean coffee. I mean, there's, it's not required. You could certainly do it at a coffee shop, which is actually how it first started. There was a couple of guys, Jim Benson and Jeremy Lightsmith, out in Seattle in 2009. They got together. They wanted to start this discussion group about using lean techniques in knowledge work. And they wanted something that was really unstructured, something that didn't come with like, oh, we're going to put together the steering committee and we got to line up all these speakers.

They just kind of wanted to see how it all went. And so they came up with this technique to hold a discussion among people. And they called it lean coffee. Cause it was held at a coffee shop. And I believe it's actually still held at possibly the same coffee shop.

We should go.

Ah, yeah. I've never been to Seattle. I'd love to go. But here's how it works. Here's how it works. So you get a bunch of people to come and there's no agenda to the conversation. The agenda gets crafted by the people who show up on that day. And they each get a bunch of three by five cards or post it notes.

And everybody who has something they want to discuss writes it down on a post it note. Then you put them all up and you start to vote on which ones are most important to you to talk about. Everybody gets two dots, and they put their two dots on the topics and you can put them both on the same topic if you want. So that's how you decide what gets talked about first. The topic that has the most dots, that goes to the top of your agenda. And you make a kanban board. So if you're not familiar with agile, a kanban board is three columns. You've got your to do, you're doing and you're done columns.

And so all the topics go in order in the to do column. And once you're ready to start the conversation, the card with the most dots moves from to do into doing. And you start, start the discussion, but you have to time box your conversation. Otherwise the entire conversation could be taken up just by this one topic. And so you set a timer. Maybe it's five minutes, maybe it's ten minutes. Whatever works best for your group, whatever everybody agrees on. And once that five minutes is up, conversation must stop.

And you vote on whether or not you want to continue talking about this same topic or move on to the next thing. Thumbs up means keep going. Thumbs down is move on. I want to talk about the next thing on the agenda or thumbs sideways is, eh, I don't care. I could go either way. So that's how lean coffee works. If you decide to continue, though, you don't get another five minutes, you actually reduce the amount of time that the conversation is continued on. So that maybe it's three minutes or two minutes that you draw it out a little bit more.

And then when that's up, you vote again.

What I love about lean coffee, right. Is it makes sure that the group is talking about the most important thing to talk about, only for as long as it's important and necessary. And it's a fantastic just discussion strategy for a group.

Yeah, absolutely.

So aside from coffee shops in Seattle with lean consultants talking about what they want to talk about for only for as long as they want to talk about, what are some of the applications that you've seen of lean coffee?

Well, actually, just the other day we used it in our leadership team meeting, and we didn't do it exactly the way that lean coffee does it. But we had items on our agenda. We added some new items. We didn't do the dot voting. I think we skipped that part. But the time boxing actually really helped us because then we could make sure that we didn't get stuck on one thing and not move on. You could also. Did you have an idea?

Well, what was interesting about that? So can we just like put it out there?

Uh huh.

Because it's entirely possible that the topic I bring up in a meeting is a topic we spend the entire meeting talking about. Right.

It's possible. And it's happened, Megan, more than once. We don't have to leave that in.

But I think what's, I think what was helpful here, because we took all of our new items on the agenda and we gave them the full allotment of time and then all of our standing updates got like a half allotment of time. I thought it was really, I was so appreciative of the fact that you brought that to our leadership meeting, because it really made a difference.

Yeah, yeah. And it's like, you know, we used a part of it. We didn't have to, like, follow it rigidly, but we took the thing that we needed and used it in that moment. So that was really cool. The other thing you could use it for is, like, if you're going to a conference, maybe you're going to one of those unstructured morning buzz sessions where people show up and you've put in that you're just gonna talk about this thing as a group, but you don't have an agenda necessarily. Cause you didn't submit this as a full conference session. You're just showing up that morning. And so this would be a really great method to use in that scenario.

Yeah. So those are kind of the things that come top of mind for me when I think about lean coffee.

So, okay, so that's lean coffee. But the topic of this podcast is learn coffee.

Yeah.

Which is kind of, you know, when we did it, like, you said it, and I was like, oh, that's interesting. What that mean? What might it mean?

Well, okay, so we did a little bit of brainstorming. One idea is that you could bring this for, like, if you're bringing together a community of practice, or you've got people with knowledge that they want to share with other people, maybe you use some of the same structure, and people come, they're ready to present an idea to the group, and they get an amount of time to do that. And then once that time is over, you vote. Do you want to hear more about this idea from them or more about what they. The topic or the presentation that they want to share with you, or are they ready to move on to the next thing?

So kind of like a different way to shark tank your ideas or concepts. Yeah, I kind of like that.

Yeah. Maybe it could be, you know, a way for learning experts to come together. They have things that they want to share with the rest of the community, and they want to not necessarily take over the entire conversation.

Well, and I think that's apropos. Right. Because experts sometimes can take over the conversation, and sometimes they don't want to. Right. Sometimes they want to hear from other people, too. So that's super cool. All right. So much goodness here.

What could possibly go wrong?

Well, yeah, there could be maybe a mismatch in expectations if you. So, morning buzz session. I think nobody has much expectations with that, but I did actually try to use this once at a very local conference here in Michigan. And the session description kind of set me up to be like the expert. I was coming in and I was going to share techniques about how to be productive at work. And because of that, everybody came in kind of thinking I was going to be like the sage on the stage and would impart to them all of my wonderful knowledge. Instead, I came and tried to do this lean coffee type of approach and get ideas from the room from people of like, what have they used and what do they want to talk about and what would help them. And they weren't really prepared for that.

And so I think setting expectations with everybody who shows up in the room is really important so that people know what they're walking into and that it's not just going to be you up there talking at them where they just get to sit back and relax and not participate.

I think that's really key. Right? Expectation setting, super important. And it doesn't put you out in the moment. Right. I like that. I like that. Okay. I'm a huge fan of lean coffee.

I've used it for years. Tell me something I don't know.

So as I was researching it in preparation for our conversation, I learned about Jim Benson's company, modus operandi, which has a single sheet that describes what is lean coffee. And the thing that I noticed on there that I had never seen before or never heard about before was they actually have a fourth column on their kanban board. And this is labeled epiphany. And the instructions say during the discussion, capture any realizations, action items or topics for future inquiry into that epiphany column. This reminds me so much of what we were talking about the other day, about how we want to track some of the learning that we're doing internally in our organization and how we want to kind of have a way to track learning insights that are taking place. You know, we've kind of not stolen. What's the right word? Borrowed, borrowed, borrowed. We've borrowed some of what Neural Leadership Institute talks about when they talk about the importance of insight in learning.

And that that's like your takeaway. And so I thought, you know, maybe lean Coffee actually always was. Learn coffee.

Oh, Meg. Yes.

Yes.

So how'd that one go, Meg?

I like that one. I like that. I got to kind of dive in and do a little bit of research into the history of lean coffee, which I didn't know before. And I got to have my own insights. Like at the very end there, it was like all the connections. Okay, quick fact check update after we recorded this episode, I went back and looked at the leancoffee.org website. There's listed on there a whole bunch of different lean coffee locations all over the world, really, and many within the United States. As I dug in a little bit further, I looked at the Seattle lean coffee organization and it looks like they discontinued their meetings sometime around 2016.

So as far as Megan and I being able to go out and join the lean coffee at that particular coffee shop, it's not likely going to happen unless they start back up again.

This is Megan Torrance with Meg Fairchild and this has been a podcast by TorranceLearning.

Tangents is the official podcast of TorranceLearning, as though we have an unofficial one. Tangents is hosted by Meg Fairchild and Megan Torrance. It's produced by Dean Castile and Meg Fairchild, engineered and edited by Dean Castile with original music also by Dean Castile. This episode was fact checked by Meg Fairchild.