How to refactor meetings as they grow with the rule of eight - Jade Rubik

This resource first appeared in issue #118 on 16 Apr 2022 and has tags Becoming A Manager: Meetings

How to refactor meetings as they grow with the rule of eight - Jade Rubik

Rubik shares a guideline — a meeting with more than eight people isn’t effective as a decision-making meeting, and so:

When you have more than eight participants, you either need to change the format of the meeting, or you need to restructure the participants (and you usually want to do some deeper work on communication and organizational structure).

There are some good examples of redesigning meetings, either shifting their focus or attendee list. But I think this is an example of the broader point that clarity of what the meeting is for can and should guide everything else about how the meeting is designed. Otherwise it’s very difficult to have the meetings be effective and efficient uses of peoples’ time.

Lucid is a company that sells meeting software and consulting, and they have a pretty nice taxonomy of sixteen meeting types in three broad categories. With the meeting type and purpose in mind, a lot of choices about the meeting (like does it have to be a synchronous meeting) start falling into place. Seeing that you have a lot of people in meeting is one symptom that such clarity is lacking, but it’s not the only one.