Imagine this, you have a meeting with about 15 people. That's a lot of people. And you want everyone to be able to express his opinion and contribute. Because yes, that's the goal of bringing people together. But, you have one hour. Once more, I'll do some math for you. You'll need to be very concentrated for a tiny moment. But it's gonna be worth it. Ready? Let's go.

If every participant in a 15 people group takes 4 minutes to share his idea to the whole group, it means 60 minutes of the meeting are used. So, there is basically no time to take decisions or do anything else in the hour you imagined for that meeting.

If instead, we split the group of 15 people in 5 groups of 3 people. We then just need 12 minutes. Because 3 times multiple people speak at the same time for 4 minutes but in different groups. That's why less!

You might argue and say: but each group might need a few more minutes to then create a summary and few more minutes to share it to all the other groups. Okay, let's do some more math:

We just add 3 minutes to the previous group work of 12 minutes to create the summary: so there is now 15 minutes of group work.

Once everybody is back together each group will need two minutes to share it's summary. That's 10 more minutes after the group work. We now have a final total of 25 minutes for the whole session. This previously took 60 minutes when we didn't split in smaller groups!

This story shows that by splitting the participants of a big meeting in smaller groups we can save a lot of time and still get to almost the same result. In that story, the team saved 35 minutes which they can use to work on the details and take decisions. My god, I love splitting groups and a bit of math magic.

So here are three things you can do to get more work done in meetings with many participants:

1. Split for discussion and join for sharing

2. Make groups of no more than 4

3. Give a clear challenge, a clear timing and a clear end result