Large Meetings: Destroyer of Worlds

In my last post, I introduced the concept of pains of scale and described how large companies invariably have lower quality employees, on average, than the best small companies. 

A second pain of scale, large meetings, emerges as those increasingly average employees try to get something done. These wholly unnatural gatherings suck the dynamism out of all firms, extinguishing the last embers of courage and creativity that were born when the companies were small. 

Executive Summary

• The math of decision-making degrades rapidly with each additional meeting attendee
• Unanimous decisions are almost impossible in large meetings, but a soft consensus can be created through mainstream, unambitious proposals. Bold and innovative ideas don’t survive large meetings  
• Large meetings are often a random walk of comments. Participants don’t listen carefully to each other, and they don’t feel an obligation to keep a discussion on topic. We are not wired, as human beings, to communicate this way 
• Large meetings can only be productive if . . . 1) They’re highly structured, with very clear “rules” of participation 2) They have a powerful leader who can enforce order 3) Nobody is expecting a meaningful dialogue or a creative solution

Details of the Argument

As companies grow larger, they start to host bigger meetings to ensure that every relevant functional area or important leader is represented. Unfortunately, large meetings are, in nearly every instance, less productive than smaller meetings.

Larger meetings are much less productive than small ones for at least two reasons. First, as more people join a meeting, the likelihood of reaching an agreement of any kind is significantly reduced. Decisions are either delayed or made with compromises that jeopardize an initiative’s focus. Second, the quality of the discussion degrades as each additional participant strives to leave their mark on the meeting.

To illustrate the first effect, let’s assume that the company we’re in is facing an important decision with three possible paths we can take. Let’s further imagine that each of the three options is objectively similar in terms of its potential outcomes--that none of them can be easily dismissed because they’re terribly risky or have little upside. In this scenario, if we host a meeting with just two employees and they arrive having independently established their points of view, there will be only a 33% chance that they will agree on a course of action at the start. 

Thirty-three percent is not very high, of course, but the odds of finding beautiful meeting harmony drop dramatically with the addition of each new meeting participant. If the meeting expands to three people, the chances of agreement from the start will drop by two-thirds to 11%. A fourth member will bring it down to a meager 4%. And if the meeting swells to six, the group will have less than a 1% chance of making a quick decision. Figure 1 illustrates how quickly the math changes. 

Remember, this scenario assumes that we have only three options to consider. The math turns considerably worse if we have a more complicated problem with more possible paths. For example, If our scenario changes from three options to six, our meeting with a half dozen employees will only have one chance in 7,700 of starting with unanimous agreement. 

I first noticed this dynamic about twenty years ago when I went on a retreat with some friends. It was still the era of VCR, and the six of us had walked down to a Blockbuster Video store to find a movie for the night. I had rented movies hundreds of times before, either on my own or with my wife, and had always found it fun to walk the aisles in search of the latest releases or old, hidden treasures. Finding the right movie was usually as enjoyable as watching it. But on this occasion, with five of my closest friends, I experienced nothing but frustration. Every time I grabbed a movie off the shelf, one or more of my pals would veto it. One friend didn’t like Science Fiction. Another liked Westerns, but not Spaghetti Westerns. A third had committed to never watching a movie with Tom Cruise in it. And in nearly every case, somebody had already seen the movie in question. Paralyzed with irreconcilable tastes, we left the Blockbuster store empty-handed.

Big meetings make decision-making very difficult, but in large companies, bloated gatherings are the norm. Organizers feel pressure to be as inclusive as possible, so they invite everyone who has even the weakest case for being there, whether it’s Fred down in Accounting or Susan from Public Relations. In smaller companies, this same pressure exists, but there are fewer functions and leaders to risk offending, so meetings can typically be limited to fewer participants. 

Stuck with the albatross of large, unproductive meetings, businesspeople of all types try to move projects ahead in big companies through a quasi-political process of compromise. Unanimous agreement will be almost impossible, but a soft consensus can often be created by developing ideas and solutions that avoid controversy. Bold, ambitious and creative concepts are sure to offend someone, or at least make them uncomfortable, so they are quickly shelved in favor of the mild and the mainstream. The consequences are predictable--in addition to producing less output, large meetings produce lower quality output. 

Bob Lutz, an automotive industry legend, describes how this phenomenon nearly destroyed General Motors in his book, Car Guys vs. Bean Counters. In GM’s glory days, for about twenty years after World War II, the design department had great power. If Harley Earl, GM’s head designer, decided that his Cadillacs were going to have ostentatious fins and chrome, no one dared challenge his judgment. Earl’s cars, uncorrupted by compromise, were alluringly beautiful and luxurious, allowing Cadillac to fulfill its marketing promise of “The Standard of the World.” But after Earl retired, power inside the company started to shift and disseminate. Soon the “bean counters” in accounting were starting to question why GM needed to spend so much money on certain parts, the engineers began challenging the benefits of such complicated features, and the marketers piped up with focus group reports that “proved” that proposed designs were too audacious. This all probably felt like progress. The design dictatorship had been replaced by a more enlightened and democratic approach that gave everyone a voice. How could that be bad? 

The cars that started rolling off the GM’s assembly lines in the early 1970s proved that the change was indeed bad. No longer guided by a few passionate artists, GM’s cars were now rolling compromises that had been, to use the appropriate insult, “designed by committee.” The design magic of the 1950s and early 1960s was never restored, leading to a decline in GM’s market share from 50% in 1962 to about 17% in 2018. 

Surely GM’s fall can’t be attributed to muddled decision-making alone. The OPEC crisis, formidable Japanese competition, and labor strife all took large bites out of the company. But the firm’s fate, regardless of some of these other shocks, came down to how badly people wanted to buy its cars. And without the focus and clarity provided by a design-focused leadership, GM was hopelessly incapable of building automobiles that incited passion in potential buyers. 

Large meetings dramatically reduce the likelihood of gaining agreement, causing participants to generate and prefer lukewarm output. Another challenge created by large meetings emerges out of the dynamics of the conversations that occur within them. If you carefully listen to what is being said within such meetings (something so few people do!), you will discover that the flow is frustratingly discontinuous. Here’s what such a gathering might sound like:

Jamie: “As you can see from the research data, customers prefer blueberry nearly two to one over kiwi, so I would like to recommend that we proceed with developing a blueberry prototype.”

Gene: “That’s interesting, Jamie. Why do you think customers are drawn to blueberry?”

Phil (cutting in before Jamie can reply): “I’m not really sure we can trust the data. Are we sure people are actually honest in these surveys?”

Belinda (cutting in): Kiwi is so hot right now. I think it has something to do with the way they’ve been marketing kiwis to kids. Have you seen those little trays with the cartoons on them in the store?

Pat: “Are we sure we’re targeting the right people? I know we agree to go after moms, but I’ve been doing a lot of research and I have to say that dads are becoming much more influential than they used to be. Did we have enough dads in the sample?

Jan: “Why are we talking about developing new flavors for the line? We have more than enough flavors already. Walmart is threatening to drop coconut as it is. And now we’re going to bring out another one?” 

Jamie made a recommendation, and instead of having a focused discussion about its merits, each member of the team generated their own new question, sometimes related to Jamie’s initial point, but often just drawn from whatever relatively random thoughts they were having at the time. Meeting participants rarely feel an obligation to keep the discussion on track. They are usually far more interested in getting their view heard. They aren’t listening to what their colleagues are saying so that they can formulate a thoughtful reply. Instead, they are impatiently waiting for their colleague who is holding the floor to take a breath so that they can interrupt with their own favorite point.  

Why does this happen? Because big meetings are unnatural. They are too dissimilar from the meaningful, thoughtful discussions we are used to having in the other parts of our lives. When deciding whether we should take a job offer, or marry our sweetheart, or buy our first home, we don’t gather eight of our casual friends into a room to toss around the pros and cons of it. We instead call one person we trust, or perhaps gather a few of them for an intimate dinner. Why? Because we want to hear what our friends have to say, in depth. We want to carefully listen to how they are thinking about our issue. We want to ask them follow-up questions. We even want to observe their expressions and their body language to see if something is going unsaid. All this is critical when we are trying to get the best advice for an important decision. 

This intensity and continuity of conversation is simply impossible in a room full of people. Could it ever work in any way? It might to some extent, but it would require a powerful moderator with permission from the group to enforce a rigid set of rules like Robert’s Rules of Order. This would create a lot more order, but as anyone who has spent any time with rules like Robert’s knows, it would come with its own disadvantages. Meetings would now be rigid affairs, with little energy and no spontaneity. Decisions would get made, but creativity and collaboration would get stifled.

Many people have observed the poor productivity of large meetings and have tried to find new ways of conducting them. I myself have employed secret ballots and quiet intermissions to fight groupthink and the random interruptions of rogue participants. The “Silent Meeting,” an Amazon innovation, goes one step further, requiring participants to silently read a shared document during the first stage of the meeting, with a defined facilitator then moderating and synthesizing the discussion.

These innovations offer important potential improvements to the typical free-for-all of large meetings, but they all seem to be susceptible to the same challenge: A single rebel is all that’s required to tear them down. One person who ignores the moderator, or diverts the group from the topic at hand, or refuses to read the documents, can tip the meeting back into chaos. The only protection against this risk is a very powerful moderator who can stop or sanction the offender in some meaningful way. Few company cultures are willing to grant that power to anyone other than the most senior officers.  

Can big corporate meetings ever be useful? Yes, but only in situations where messages need to be shared widely and across several layers of hierarchy. If the CEO needs to announce a new strategy or share this quarter’s results, a large town-hall-like meeting can be extremely effective. In this context, a very large meeting works well because:

• It’s highly structured
• The “rules” of participation are very clear--nobody will dare interrupt the speaker(s)
• A powerful leader can enforce order
• Nobody is expecting a dialogue. At best, a monologue will be followed by a structured Q&A session

Brad Anderson, the former CEO of Best Buy, has said that, “Nothing brilliant ever came out of a committee,” a very succinct summary of the argument I’m trying to make here. Big meetings produce mediocre output, and they do it slowly. While this may be perfect for some non-business applications (like legislatures, which need to be slow and deliberate producers of compromise), it is crippling to firms that need to produce creative solutions at a rapid pace.  

The Second Law of Large Companies: Large companies have lots of large meetings. Large meetings produce mediocre output, and they do it slowly.