If you’re part of a team or even part of several teams (unlucky) then you’re probably having regular team meetings. Maybe you like these meetings and they’re productive - it’s a chance to catch up with everyone and find out what’s happening. On the other hand, if more than 3 of these bullets sound familiar you’re having bad team meetings…
The meeting starts 5 minutes late by the time enough people have showed up
A Powerpoint slide appears with an agenda
Someone has a pen poised to take minutes (to type into a Word document later)
The first item is to review the actions from last time (most of them weren’t done and are ‘carried forward’)
You talk about or listen to whatever the meeting owner has decided, regardless of how important it is to business outcomes
I’ve been in these sorts of meetings and they aren’t fun. If you’re busy with value-adding work they are so wasteful. There is another way! It’s Lean Coffee.
What is Lean Coffee?
It’s a structured agendaless meeting designed to cover the most important topics as quickly as possible.
How does it work?
Find the topics. Go round the room and ask each person what the important topics are that they want to discuss.
Once you have all the topics, remove duplicates and vote on the most popular ones - 3 votes each.
Rank the topics by popularity.
Start a timer (7 minutes is good for a 1 hour meeting).
Kick-off the top topic discussion by asking whoever created it to start.
… Ding ding! Vote to keep discussing for 2 more minutes (thumb up) or move onto the next topic (some other hand signal but not thumb down).
Repeat step 6 until the group votes to move onto the next topic, then go to step 4.
This is a brilliant way to have the most important items discussed as efficiently as possible.
Virtual and In Real Life Lean Coffees
Virtual: agile.coffee is great and also free. Very quick to set up and saves Miro dot voting hassles.
In Real Life: Post-its for getting the ideas. Sticky dots, sharpies or raised hands for the voting.
If you attend crap regular meetings, why not volunteer to run it one time as a Lean Coffee? Your colleagues will thank you!
Happy meetings!
Iain