Lean Coffee Table Takes Flight 

Overview

Lean Coffee Table is an online tool for organised and effective collaboration, but that doesn’t mean it is restricted to only being collaborative online. We met with Tom Fitzpatrick, Director of Consultant Relations from Extreme Networks, who used the tool at the company’s annual in-person user conference, to drive engaging and insightful discussions.

Extreme Networks is global leader in networking.  Each year, the company hosts a user conference to bring the broader community together to learn more about the company’s business strategy, products, and solutions.

A key element of the conference is to gather customers into different ‘Birds of a Feather’ sessions with their industry peers, where they talk through challenges and solutions. These sessions are highly interactive and require someone to capture ideas in the discussion and share to a common framework to encourage conversation and engagement. In previous years, this session was facilitated with sticky notes, whiteboards, and flip charts, which as you can imagine, came with constraints.

Case Study

When Fitzpatrick was given the task of organising this year’s sessions, he wanted to lean into something more progressive and automated to simplify the process of planning and execution.  After a recommendation from a customer, Fitzpatrick piloted Lean Coffee Table to take the place of the manually intensive process of stacking messy sticky notes and charts.

85 people attended Extreme’s Birds of a Feather sessions at CONNECT. Six different rooms were set up, where birds flocked according to their interest, ranging from State and Local Government, Higher education to Sports, Venues and Hospitality.

Attendees scanned a QR code at the doors and joined their chosen board through their mobile phone. They then added topics or questions to the board. After 15 minutes, participants voted on which topics they would like to discuss and then put their personal devices away. This allowed the participants to focus on the facilitator’s screen and one another for the time-boxed discussions. Once the timer ended, instead of the thumbs-up/down feature, the group raised their hands if they wanted to continue discussing the topic (alternatively, mobile devices could have been used again here to collect the votes). Meanwhile a ‘scribe’ captured all the attendees’ comments and actions on the shared board. The sessions ran smoothly, and after they had finished the Summary PDF was sent to all attendees.

Benefits of Lean Coffee Table  

1. The conversation is kept relevant and focused, through the ‘crowd-sourced’ agenda and the time-boxed conversations. This means the time spent discussing topics is aligned to the collective interest of the group.

2. Discussions can be paused and picked up again later, which meant for Extreme Networks, the Birds of a Feather sessions could easily be interwoven into the two-day conference in the future, rather than limiting to one session. This would be a lot trickier to organise when collecting physical sticky notes from each room and having to remember their placement for the next day.

3. The output from the sessions is actionable and instant. Extreme’s product teams could now easily review the topics and comments and compile the data from all 6 sessions to drive future conversations and actions.

Now that people are talking, Fitzpatrick is curious to see how LCT might be incorporated into continued outreach to customers and resellers online, either in the format of more frequent ‘Birds of a Feather’ sessions or to support the roll-out of new features or services.

Takeaways

 As teams and communities transition back to the office and in-person events, they should lean into using digital solutions to facilitate in-person meetings.  We’ve all acquired new tools designed to drive collaboration in remote environments and there’s tremendous opportunity to use those tools in new ways.

Lean Coffee Table is also continually evolving and thanks to Tom’s case study, we are looking to add the ability to generate board QR codes within the application. This will allow guests fast and easy access to the board, particularly in-person sessions/ events. Watch out for this new feature coming soon…

Let me see those hands!

Lean Coffee sessions are often being run for 20 or more people, which can sometimes be difficult to facilitate or to notice when someone would like to say something, especially when video cameras are not enabled. This feature allows attendees to indicate when they would like to speak and enables the facilitator to easily monitor and manage the speaker queue.

Users have begun to use similar functionality in Zoom and Teams and have found it to be a valuable tool to enable everyone to be heard.

How it works

1. The Facilitator can turn on the ‘Hands up to speak’ functionality.
2. Users will then see a hand appear above the topic that is currently being discussed.
3. When a User clicks on the hand, their name is added at the bottom of the speaker queue panel on the right-hand side.
4. The Facilitator can then select a person from the ‘Speaker queue’ to give the next person the ‘microphone’.
5. The User can remove themselves from the queue (put down their hand) by clicking on the hand icon again.
6. The Facilitator can also remove a person from the queue or choose to clear the queue completely.
7. The queue is cleared automatically when the next topic is moved into the ‘Discussing’ column.  

Threaded Comments

No more cluttered and confusing conversation threads. You can now easily track conversations and reply to specific comments as they happen for increased collaboration and improved feedback.  Adding a threaded comment creates a conversation ‘branch’, which enables clearer, cleaner discussions.

How it works

Click on the ‘reply’ icon within the comments box to respond to a comment. 

Threaded comments can still be edited and deleted by the comment author or the facilitator. When a comment is deleted, you will still be able to read any associated threaded comments, but the ‘parent’ comment will no longer be visible.  

Track and Share

Comment threads will be recorded within the downloadable Meeting Summary .pdf, along with the recorded topics, actions and learnings to share after the meeting.  

Hide Author in Lean Coffee Summaries

We have finally got around to one of the most requested fixes. Previously whilst the facilitator could hide the topic author on the board, this anonymity did not continue through to the summary PDF.

Now, when you create the summary at the end of your Lean Coffee meeting, you can choose to make it confidential.

In addition to ensuring votes aren’t influenced by topic authors, this new feature helps create a safe space for conversations, increasing engagement and participation from all attendees.

How it works

When the Facilitator ends a meeting, they will now see the option to ‘Show Topic Authors’ or hide them within the summary PDF.

Still brewing

It is still possible for the facilitator to see who has written the topics, and to reveal this with the ‘Show Authors’ option if they choose to.

We plan to make the board ‘permanently anonymous’ from the moment the board is created. This requires additional work so that the author is not stored in the database. We hope to announce this functionality soon.

Hack my coffee

In the meantime, if anonymity is very important to you, then please use the ‘Guest’ link and ask people to enter a fake name. Whilst this may not be ideal, it will mean that all topics and comments are not traceable to an individual.