There is a common misconception that inviting every person involved in a project’s success or failure makes it less likely to become a total fuck up. You will see this a lot with rookie project managers and team leads who think they can cover their ass by inviting everybody. Other times it isn’t so much CYA, but they just can’t handle the office politics around excluding anyone.
Unfortunately, far from protecting their reputation or making sure “everyone” is informed, the opposite always happens. The project falls apart, with quality and scope compromised from committee based decision making. Milestones get missed and dependencies fall through the cracks. Funnily, almost always someone will say in the retrospective how inefficient the meetings were.
Let’s go back to the rookie who takes a big hit on the project. They are absolutely confounded that people said things were inefficient and that the stakeholders felt poorly informed. I’ve seen more than one say something akin to “But you were all there!!!”
And that was the problem.
The unintuitive fact: the more people involved with any meeting, the worse it is going to go. Usually, the issue is every single person in the room has plausible deniability. They are going to look at a room of 15+ people and think that they are all paying attention and will do the right thing. In social psychology the phenomenon is called “Diffusion of Responsibility” and can cause all sorts of insane things to happen (like war crimes).
Extreme results aside, in meetings a similar thing happens. The project can be crying out for help, yet the more people listening to all the problems makes it less likely any of them will do anything at all. Everyone thinks the problems are not their problems if they are paying attention at all. Therefore it is incredibly unlikely these problems are handled before they become realities.
The solution is so simple, but initially so counterintuitive that I continue to meet people who’ve never figured it out: Small meetings.
In small meetings, no one can hide. Ideal meetings only have one representative from each team or department. Every person has a clear role and purpose for being there. Every problem has a clearly accountable person who has to handle it. With every additional person added, it increases the likelihood that those very same attendees will not feel accountable anymore. And when the group gets big enough keeping anyone accountable for anything becomes the biggest issue.
Life Tip (not work):
Whenever you are in a group of people, ALWAYS assume diffusion of responsibility is occurring. Whole rooms of people, entire subway cars, busy city streets…. The amount of times something fucked up happens and everyone just sort of watches it unfold is too fucking high. I’ve come to believe that the difference between people we call heroes and normal folk isn’t courage. Most people have enough courage to do the right thing. It’s that heroes don’t assume anyone else will do it, so they act first.
I’m not saying to put yourself in harm’s way or anything. But just knowing that the more people around makes it less likely for anyone to step up… Well that’s a great first step towards being the person you should be and you might just change someone else’s life for the better.