I don’t like large meetings, particularly multiple day meetings. I prefer small group discussions that solve a specific problem– this could be brainstorming solutions, ideas, identifying problems, etc. While I see the need for a large meeting in specific scenarios, what I will rile against are the large meetings that include 50+ people over multiple days– My assertion is that consulting companies (small and large) push this on companies that don’t have a Day 1 culture.
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Some excerpts about Day 1 versus Day 2 culture attributed to https://aws.amazon.com/executive-insights/content/how-amazon-defines-and-operationalizes-a-day-1-culture/— “Day 1 is both a culture and an operating model that puts the customer at the center of everything Amazon does. Day 1 is about being constantly curious, nimble, and experimental. Contrast this to a “Day 2” mentality: as a company grows over time, it needs to adjust its approach to effectively manage the organization as it scales. The danger is that as this happens, decision making can slow down, and the company can become less agile, moving further and further away from the customer as it rotates focus towards internal challenges rather than external customer-centric innovation”
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I bolded the words that showed the big difference between the 2 cultures. Being agile and fast in making reversible decisions are critical for real customer feedback and to iterate (seems obvious). The internal challenges verbiage is interesting, because many big corporations spend more energy on getting ‘alignment’ internally than on solving the customer problem– the solution seems to satisfy the senior executives and leads to sub-optimal customer experience and expects the customer to navigate organizational hierarchy of the company.
Why do I bring up the Day 1 versus Day 2 culture and how it relates to large multi-day meetings? The selling point of large multi-day meetings matches those characteristics– ‘collaboration’, ‘alignment’, ‘bring everyone on same page’. These “fluffy” objectives are all “internal“, has nothing to do with the customer.
My preference is to do the bulk of the work in small groups, be detailed in the articulation of the problem, solutions and options considered and recommend something concrete before getting a large group together. The larger group can still be effective if the objective is limited to reading the details and providing feedback (this should not take more than a couple of hours, definitely not multiple days).