A Randomized Coffee Trial, also known as an RCT, is a social experiment where individuals are randomly matched for coffee meetings, aiming to facilitate serendipitous connections, knowledge sharing, and relationship building in a casual setting.
The History
The original idea was inspired by Pedro Medina and developed by Michael Soto and Jon Kingsbury of Nesta UK in 2013. Nesta is an innovation charity that aims to help people and organizations bring great ideas to life.
Since then, many organizations have adopted them, although some were running similar meetings long before Nesta.
As of September 2014, organizations running Randomised Coffee Trials included:
- Cabinet Office (UK)
- Scottish Government (UK)
- Royal Society of Arts (UK)
- KHDA (UAE)
- Mars (UK)
- 4Ps Marketing (UK)
- Surrey County Council (UK)
- National Audit Office (UK)
- MWH Global (UK)
- BAE Systems (US)
- SABMiller (UK)
- Bank of England (UK)
- Linklaters (UK)
- NatCen Social Research (UK)
- The British Library (UK)
- UK Trade and Investment (UK)
- Aberdeenshire Council (UK)
- National Health Service (UK)
- Fluor (Global)
- Huawei (Global)
The Process
You can run a Randomised Coffee Trial in various ways, but I describe the essence below.
Anyone interested in taking part sends an email to an administrator or central address and asks to be registered with the service. They could also do this by signing up on the corporate intranet.
Each week or month, a specially designed piece of software matches people at random and informs them of the connection by email.
Some organizations use a spreadsheet to do the matching or a more straightforward technique like drawing names from a hat.
There are also specialist services that take all of the administration off your hands. Spark Collaboration is one such service created by one of the co-inventors of the RCT – Michael Soto.
It is then up to the pair who have been matched to get in touch with each other and organize a chat over coffee.
It is as simple as that.
The Benefits
Nesta says this about the benefits of the Randomised Coffee Trial:
- It provides legitimacy to chat with people about things that aren’t directly work-related. Although every time, there have been direct beneficial impacts on various projects and programs.
- Totally random conversations, as well as some beneficial work, related conversations, break silos at Nesta in an effective way.
- It offers the chance to make time to talk to people they should be talking to anyway and to meet people who they won’t be directly working with, but it’s nice to know who they are!
- It’s an excellent way of revealing links within the organization and encouraging us to collaborate. Interestingly, being part of the wider ‘RCT’ banners gives permission to spend and honor the time. Less likely to cancel a catch-up if it’s an RCT coffee than a social catch-up on a busy day.
- They like the prompt to talk to someone new (or someone they already know) and the permission to take 30 minutes to see what’s going on without any particular agenda or goal.
Process Variation
When setting up a Randomised Coffee Trial, like any other endeavor, it makes sense to start with the purpose and design the RCT to meet that objective.
In a standard RCT, two people are matched at random once a week or once a month and permitted to have a face-to-face conversation over coffee on any topic they wish or simply an open conversation where they get to know each other.
The purpose of a standard RCT is for the participants to get to know each other, and the overall aim is to break down some of the silos in the organization and help build community and a sharing, more caring culture.
Also, people discover unexpected synergies between their work and develop an increased level of comfort for subsequently approaching each other regarding potential collaboration.
Nothing is usually captured.
But you can vary this standard process depending on your organization and objectives.
- You can change the frequency. The participants can even choose their frequency or opt out of some sessions.
- You can vary the timing. The sessions can be during or outside working hours.
- You can make the session a breakfast, lunch, or even a dinner meeting or a drink. It does not have to be coffee.
- The session could be a walk or a visit to an art gallery or museum.
- In a geographically dispersed organization – the meeting need not be face-to-face; it could be a virtual one, say over Skype, a telephone call, or a Google Hangout.
- The duration could be for longer than 30 minutes. E.g., an hour.
- More than two people could be matched, say 3 or 4.
- Each session could be associated with a theme or question, and the participants required to talk about that issue.
- There could be a pool of questions. One question could be assigned to the pair at random. Or they could be given a menu of topics/questions to choose from.
- Each participant could be required to write something after the match. It could be a short paragraph describing the value they got from the conversation or actionable insight.
- The match need not be random. It could be across a divide, e.g., Manager v new starter, older v younger, gender, country, religion, political leaning, race, etc.
- You do not have to call it a Randomised Coffee Trial. It could be called a “Coffee Club”, “Coffee Connect”, or something that makes sense in your context.
But be careful; the power of a Randomised Coffee Trial is its simplicity and the fact that it allows people to meet in a way that suits them and talk about whatever they wish.
Randomised Coffee Trials at Conferences
RCTs are perfect for running at conferences. Conference participants can be randomly matched and can connect and chat on the phone or Skype before the conference, or they can meet and talk during the conference, say at a coffee break or lunch. It’s a great way of connecting people who may never normally get to meet and talk.
Virtual Random Café
A similar process to the RCT is the virtual random café.
Hundreds of organizations across public, private, and voluntary sectors have introduced RCTs with great results. Try them yourself.
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Stories
- Randomised Coffee Trials at the Red Cross Red Crescent
- Randomised Coffee Trials in the UK National Health Service
Resources
- Gurteen Knowledge: Randomised Coffee Trials
- Blog Post: Here’s How Michael And I Got RCTs Going At Nesta
- Blog Post: Institutionalising Serendipity Via Productive Coffee Breaks
- Website: Spark Collaboration
Posts that link to this post
- Virtual Random Café A simple networking method in times of COVID
- Connect People Purposefully connect people with each other
- The World Talks The world's biggest dialogue experiment
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