I love lean coffee — don’t get me wrong. It’s a fantastic way for people to learn from each other and generate new insights in a psychologically safe environment.

In fact, just today I added the ability to run a traditional lean coffee conversation. The new option is called “vote on topics at the beginning only.”

However, after experiencing Holacracy, and especially the practice of dynamic agenda building, I’ve discovered a few ways to improve it.

The typical pattern is:

1. Everybody contributes topics to the agenda
2. Go around and have people explain why they submitted their topic
3. Use dot voting to prioritize the list
4. Go through the list in order of priority

I have issues with 2 of these:

2. Explaining topics

I have seen some people take a very long time to explain their topics, sometimes taking multiple minutes. We don’t all naturally come with good summarization skills. It took me many hours of training to learn how to be concise without losing meaning.

I’d much rather people figure out how to come up with a good topic title that is self-explanatory. My feeling is that when there is less context, the wisdom of the crowd is more likely to be accurate. “Too much communication can make the group as a whole less intelligent.” —Wisdom of Crowds on Wikipedia

4. Fixed agenda throughout

One of the coolest innovations of Holacracy that I found almost mind blowing in its simplicity is the dynamic agenda. Not only is the agenda built by its participants, it can change even in the midst of a meeting! People can withdraw agenda items, and even add new ones, in the midst of the meeting. And the group just keeps processing them as they go.

This has some positive effects:

1. When folks want to talk about something that isn’t on the agenda (perhaps they had an insight sparked by a different item), they have a place to put that idea so they don’t feel the need to hijack someone else’s topic
2. If the group has suddenly learned something new, the old agenda may not make sense. And people may want to remove topics that didn’t fit any more.

With an evolving agenda even mid-conversation, people feel more in-control of their own destiny.

Here’s how Coffee Time has been adapting to make space for this kind of dynamism:

1. People can change their votes even after the conversation has started and
2. If a topic has been removed, the votes that were on that topic are “refunded” so folks can still influence the conversation in the direction it needs to go

Also, as a host, I have found lots of success skipping the explanation portion altogether. This encourages folks to make their topics a bit more clear.

Of course, all this can cause the flow of the conversation to get a bit wonky. If the host waits for all votes to be entered every time it’s time to choose a new topic, there is a lot of “dead time” in the conversation. If the opposite happens, and the host doesn’t wait between topics, people may feel concerned they didn’t have time to adjust their votes.

One thing a host can do is to remind folks who are new throughout the conversation that they can change their votes. An especially good time for this is when there is a pause in the conversation due to an unexpected insight or simply a moment of group introspection.

Of course, as I continue to experiment more with these conversation style innovations, I will be updating the Coffee Time platform. And, maybe I will put together some training material!

Let me know your thoughts!