We’ve always advocated using small breakout groups a lot during events. We’ve found it even more important when hosting on zoom.
Generally speaking, if a breakout goes above 4 people, the likelihood of participation starts to drop like a stone. We’ll often use threes and pairs too, giving lots of space for people to hear themselves think.
So we were pleased to find lots of research to support our experience in this Scientific American article: If you want creative solutions, keep your team small.
It reports a massive meta-study of 65 million million papers, patents and software products to measure the effect of team size on productivity. They specifically looked to assess how disruptive the teams’ thinking was. The bottom line: smaller teams’ work was more disruptive. If you drill down to the data here, there are some fascinating little graphs showing as a group increases in size it cites more papers but creates fewer disruptive ideas.
The larger the group, the more likely it is that participants will be overwhelmed the challenging of relation to more people, and the likelihood of things like social loafing rises (in a large group, people just check out and let the loudest voices do the work).
For years, we’ve talked about plenary vortex – how the larger the group, the more likely are to see participants drop into a trance, and this is magnified online. We share lots of ways to escape this on our Naked Facilitator training.