A lack of inspiration – Ideas for Community Sessions: Lean Coffee

Photo by Clark Tibbs on Unsplash

A common question I get asked is ‘what type of things should I be doing in my community sessions?’. I thought it would be an idea to write out a selection of ideas that can be applied to most communities regardless of what they focus on as a source of inspiration. They might work for you, they might not – they might just inspire you to do something similar but different instead. Whatever you use this for, hopefully you find it interesting! I’ll try and do a few of these as I think of them, but I’m always open to learning new ideas so feel free to share your own!

Lean Coffee

What is it?

You’ve almost certainly done one of these before somewhere along the lines - Lean Coffee is a structured, agenda-free format that’s designed to facilitate productive and engaging discussions amongst people who are either new or familiar to each other

What’s good about it?

Its sooooo easy to organise. Many of the experienced community leaders that I know will use a lean coffee session when things have gone a bit wrong – maybe a speaker has had to drop out at short notice, or some other malady has occurred which means plans have gone astray. They are excellent sessions to run when you have little to no prep time (although of course they still require facilitation).

The other thing I like about Lean Coffee is that it’s a great way to build connections between people who don’t know each other all that well.  I usually recommend that a new fledgling community hold a Lean Coffee as its first community session, as it lets attendees get to know each other, find out if they share values with each other, and decide if they want to become part of a group or community with each other.

How do I do it?

Good news – There are detailed step by step instructions on how use set up and run a lean coffee session that can be found here! Get this link in your bookmarks as you’ll definitely want to refer to it in the future. For completeness though, I will summarise for you here…

Set up a Kanban board: If you’re online, use Whiteboard, Trello, Padlet, Miro, or whatever tool you are familiar with amd prefer. If you’re in-person, use Post-its, paper, and pens. Have three columns – ‘To Discuss’, ‘Currently Discussing’, and ‘Discussed’.

Add some suggestions: Give participants a few minutes to add some topics and ideas to the board. You might give them a theme to work within (e.g. challenges in your domain space), or you might let them choose to talk about whatever they want. My go-to card that I will ALWAYS add to a Lean Coffee board is ‘What book have you read recently?’, as it gives me an excuse to talk about and find other people who want to talk about books!

Vote for the popular ones: Give participants three dot votes, and ask them to pick the topics they want to talk about. Then start with the one with the most votes

Time box: 8 minutes is generally a reasonable amount of time to talk about a subject during a Lean Coffee, but do what works for your session length. When the 8 minutes comes to an end you should halt the conversation, and ask participants to thumbs up/thumbs down vote (also known as a Roman vote) whether they want to keep talking or move on.

Thanks so much for reading, if you’ve enjoyed this post I’d really appreciate it if you could share it - alternatively you could always buy me a coffee :)