A lot of my life is spent leading and facilitating meetings with teams. One observation that I have made is that, when you have more than 9 people in a room, meaningful discussion drops exponentially.
Once there are 10 or more, participants feel like they’re ‘presenting.’ They don’t want to slip up. They think hard before they contribute to the discussion and are very careful with what they say. They don’t say anything that they might thing is ‘risky.’
All of this makes for meetings that are slower, and way less interesting.
Next time you meet, figure out how you can get the meeting to 9 people or less.
