One image from the coverage of the French riots sticks in my mind - and it’s not one of those blazing cars. It’s the huge number of senior politicians and their advisors photographed round an enormous table for crisis meeting after meeting. Their numbers absolutely guaranteed that no effective action would be taken, for wasted day after wasted day. Governments, businesses and most other organisations are very prone to have excessive numbers of meetings and excessive numbers at meetings.
Britain’s cabinet always has 20-plus members. That didn’t matter in the first two Blair administrations, because the Prime Minister ignored the Cabinet anyway. He preferred cosy little meetings on sofas in his office - meetings at which no minutes were kept and no decisions properly recorded. That’s just as damaging to decent decision-making as having too many people at a properly conducted meeting.
So what’s the answer? I’ve generally found that seven is the maximum number that is compatible with speed and efficiency. The reason is partly mechanical. If each of the seven speaks for 10 minutes, you’ve got a 70-minute meeting. With preliminaries and summing up, that’s going to come to an hour and a half - and in my experience, that’s quite long enough for most agendas.
There is of course the Japanese approach, in which very big meetings are controlled by a simple insistence on people just rising, stating their position, and sitting down again. The chairman goes to everybody in turn and then delivers his supposedly consensual verdict. Of course, that may be what he wanted all the time. Which reminds me of the dictatorial British tycoon who stipulated that important meetings should always be of odd numbers and always involve less than three people…
read all 70 gurus with one feed read all Read all media
