While my experience matches yours exactly, I just wanted to add to this point:
> "One on one meetings are underrated; group meetings waste time"
My rule of thumb is, “up to 5 people is a meeting; more than 5 is a presentation.”
> "One on one meetings are underrated; group meetings waste time"
My rule of thumb is, “up to 5 people is a meeting; more than 5 is a presentation.”
I like this.
I do think it's possible to still have an effective meeting with more people (up to, I don't know maybe 8-10?) but it becomes increasingly important to have tight rules around how the meeting runs and what it's supposed to achieve.
I’ve often been in them in the baffling position of seeing two people try to discuss something in a way that’s abundantly clear that neither of them understands what the other is saying in more than a very basic way.
You can definitely have useful big meetings but it gets harder with increasing size. Rules are one defense, but having a room of people actually good at communicating is much better.
And really, do everything you can to kill the meetings where it’s just an obligatory “everybody figure out something to say”
Yes! The meetings where a small number of people are just having a debate with spectators are particularly awful for everybody concerned.
> You can definitely have useful big meetings but it gets harder with increasing size.
One of the most frustrating meeting dysfunctions I've seen is where large numbers of people are mentally checked out of discussions they're actually needed for - they keep needing stuff to be repeated, which results in others mentally checking out.
Eventually it's like a punishment from Hades in which your meeting can never achieve anything but will never end until it does.
In the past I've actually run a (somewhat) larger meeting by applying pretty tight time constraints. Actually saying "we're going to get this process fully done in X minutes" focuses minds and makes it become true.
> Rules are one defense, but having a room of people actually good at communicating is much better.
Back when we were in a physical office I also experimented with banning use of laptops in larger meetings - I think it did actually improve the quality (and speed) of communication in the meeting.
But, generally, building that habit of good communication in a team feels really hard. And the shift towards massively more remote working over the last few years has changed the landscape a bit - it seems much easier to stay silent or check out of a video conference.
Any suggestions from HN for good principles / reading materials on this?
Here in the United States, the official cabinet has over 20 members, obviously too big to serve as such an inner circle.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cabinet_of_the_United_States#H...
Parkinson's book is really brilliant observation, with a humorous overlay.
And two people can just meet at a desk. If cubes were still a thing you could do three people without even getting a room.
I don't actually know what my real limit is because I try a little too hard not to find out. Once bitten, twice shy. I'm sure at some point I'll be paid to find out, and I'll go as slow as they'll let me.
(Stand ups, while arguably valuable, are like a series of short presentations, so IMO don’t count as meetings).
I can't get the sentiment to stay put in the 'right' or 'wrong' column so it's always just sort of there bugging me, like a raspberry seed stuck in my teeth. As someone said either elsewhere in this thread or in another conversation recently, waiting until morning to tell people you're stuck is not an optimal solution. I tend to find that pain points are information, but I'm not sure what the clever solution is to this problem.
Both of these folks asserted we'd be better off spending some time discussing the ways in which we've gotten unstuck, as a counterpoint to talking about how we got stuck, as a more pro-active way of broadcasting hard-won knowledge to the group.