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Some ideas based on numbers or ratios are valuable and worth remembering.
One of these is the "Meetings Rule of 8".
💡 A meeting with more than 8 people is no longer a decision-making meeting.
🎯 It becomes a presentation, a status update, or theatre.
⚠️ The quality of decisions and real discussion degrades as the room fills up.
🔑 The Rule of 8 is simple: if more than 8 people are in the room, you no longer have a meeting — you have an audience.
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🎓 Robert Sutton, a professor of organisational behaviour at Stanford University, reviewed the research on group size and concluded that the most productive meetings contain only five to eight people.
🔍 Beyond eight, there is a tipping point — the quality of conversation begins to erode.
👥 More people = more coordination, more bureaucracy, more noise — and less real output.
🧱 Research shows that meetings with over 9 attendees are unproductive, as friction grows in proportion to the number of participants.
🤐 However, meetings with fewer than 5 people run the risk of groupthink — where participants conform to the majority view rather than contributing their real opinion.
✅ The sweet spot? 5 to 8 people.
🎯 Small enough for real decisions. Large enough for diverse perspectives.
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🌍 One of the most well-known applications of this principle comes from Amazon.
🍕🍕 Jeff Bezos established a simple rule: no meeting should include more people than two pizzas could feed.
👤 Two pizzas ≈ 5 to 8 people.
⏱️ Bezos understood that every extra person in a meeting adds coordination cost, dilutes accountability, and slows decision-making.
🚀 More people = more of everything:
❌ More coordination
❌ More bureaucracy
❌ More chaos
❌ Slower decisions
✅ The smaller the meeting, the faster — and better — the decision.
🧮 Most businesses don't think about meetings as a financial cost — but they are.
📌 A simple example:
👥 10 people in a meeting @ an average fully-loaded cost of $100/hour each
⏱️ A 1-hour meeting = $1,000 spent
📅 If that meeting runs weekly = $52,000 per year
🚨 And that's before accounting for the productivity lost in preparation, travel, and recovery time around the meeting.
🔥 Before sending that next calendar invite, add up the cost of the room. You might reconsider who really needs to be there.
📋 Every meeting should be classified before it is scheduled:
✅ Decision meetings 🎯 → cap at 8, ideally 5–7. Everyone must have a role.
✅ Update / status meetings 📊 → consider replacing with a written summary or shared dashboard.
✅ Brainstorm sessions 💡 → break into smaller groups, then consolidate outputs.
✅ Large information meetings 📣 → these are presentations, not decisions. Run them differently.
🧭 A practical test before every meeting invite:
❓ Is this a decision or an update?
❓ Who in the room is a decision-maker — and who is just a spectator?
❓ Could the spectators receive meeting notes or a summary instead?
❓ Could this be handled with email?
📤 For those who miss out on the invite:
📝 Share notes from the meeting to other relevant teams
🌐 Publish outcomes on the company shared drive
❓ How many people attended our last three meetings — and how many were actually needed?
❓ What is the fully-loaded hourly cost of our regular meetings?
❓ Are our meetings making decisions, or just sharing information?
❓ Does every person in the room have a clear role or contribution?
❓ Are we inviting people to avoid conflict or politics — rather than because they're needed?
❓ Could a well-written one-page update replace 60% of our standing meetings?
❓ What would happen if we halved the number of people in our leadership meeting?
Key Research: Robert Sutton, Professor of Organisational Behaviour, Stanford University
Article: The Most Productive Meetings Have Fewer Than 8 People — Harvard Business Review (hbr.org, 2018)
Article: How to Refactor Meetings as They Grow with the Rule of Eight — Jade Rubick (rubick.com)
Recommended Book: Meetings Matter — Paul Axtell
Recommended Book: Read This Before Our Next Meeting — Al Pittampalli