Even though the groups are now eight people, the participants already have had the opportunity to share their ideas and thoughts in the smaller group. It also works well to have people work in groups of four, and then come together with another small group of four to share and build on existing ideas. That allows all the participants to feel that they have contributed to the discussion and then have ownership of the material generated. But if you want to explore and validate ideas, small groups of about four are ideal. To merely share information and receive somewhat limited feedback, you can use larger groups of say 10 to 20. The old fashioned brainstorming method of a group of people excitedly calling out ideas is not as effective as assumed – we debunked that myth in an earlier episode.
But remember to allow people to first work individually to quietly jot down the ideas that come to their mind.
If we are wanting to generate ideas, then we will want small groups of around four people. We will run through some of the scenarios and discuss the effect of group size.
The question about ideal group numbers is part of the meeting design phase, so we need to be clear about why we are forming small groups in the first place. You might notice we do not say face-to-face versus online meetings, as you can usually still see people’s faces in online meetings, so technically they are face-to-face meetings! That’s why when we talk about the options, we refer to them as physical meetings and online meetings. We do not believe that an online meeting is much different from a physical meeting. We are going to begin by going back to basics. We think we know why they chose to do that, but we will come to that later. John was recently in an online meeting where he was placed in a breakout room with about 20 other people, which was a rather unsatisfying experience for him and we assume most others in the group. It is now relatively easy to create breakout rooms in several webinar platforms, but what is the ideal group size for them? In this episode we’re going to explore whether it is two or twenty-two, or somewhere in between.
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