In this guide, we teach you how to facilitate meetings with large groups. We discuss how to prepare the meeting and explain how dividing into smaller groups might help.

📚 This guide is part of a series on how to facilitate meetings.

Large group meetings pose particular challenges for facilitators. Any more than 12 people can exhibit all the charac­teristics of a big group – it doesn't have to be hundreds of participants.

Large groups can:

• Make it more difficult for less assertive people to participate. Not everyone is comfortable speaking in front of a large meeting.

• Be easily dominated by a confident few.

• Have a slower pace and lower energy than smaller groups – taking longer to reach decisions.

This guide provides some useful tips, for an in-depth discussion of consensus decision-making in large groups see our guide to Consensus decision-making.

Prepare the meeting #

Planning: Larger group meetings need more preparation and planning. It may be harder to think on your feet and adjust your plans as you go along. This is partly because you get less immediate feedback from people - it is harder to see faces, and people are less likely to chip in comments and suggestions. At the same time, it is always important to try to respond to what is going on in the room, rather than rigidly delivering your plan. For example, even in a large group, you are likely to notice when levels of energy and attention drop. Try to strike a balance between pre-planning and being responsive.

Agenda items: Which items need to be discussed and agreed by everyone? Which can be delegated to smaller groups? Not everyone needs to discuss the exact wording of the news release, or the order of bands for the benefit gig!

Time: Allow extra time for large group meetings to enable adequate discussion and an opportunity for people to express and hear all the ideas. Cutting off discus­sion and forcing a decision will leave lots of people feeling disempowered and frustrated.

The facilitation team: You will need a facilita­tion team who all know exactly what job they are doing – someone to facilitate, someone to take hands, someone to write up notes on a flip chart, maybe a separate timekeeper and a doorkeeper, someone to prepare refreshments.

Clear process: Take time at the beginning of the meeting to explain clearly how the meeting will work, what the agenda is like, how decisions are made, what guidelines there are for behaviour in meetings. Make use of flipcharts to write up the agenda, key points of the discussion, key decisions etc. Try and ensure the flipchart can be seen by everyone in the group.

Divide into groups #

In large groups it's sensible to consider whether you can delegate any of the issues to a smaller group. However, sometimes the issues will be so important that they have to be discussed and decided by everyone. It can also be very inspiring to have an open discussion with everyone – collectively coming to good decisions and seeing that everyone supports the agreement reached.

You can use a combination of small and large group discussions to deal with some of the draw­backs of large meetings. Large group plenaries can be used to share information, making proposals and final decision-making. Splitting into small groups can speed up some of the discussion phases.

The advantages of breaking into small groups for discussion are that they create safer, more dynamic spaces to work in and include more people in a discussion. Small groups can each discuss different elements of a topic, covering more ground in a shorter time.

There will be some people who would prefer to spend their whole time in a large group. If they are confident contributing in that setting they may feel that it is more efficient for everyone to be together. Or if you have several topics discussed by different groups at the same time, they may struggle to choose. People may also lack trust in the feedback process. For example, if the person reporting back from a small group discussion doesn't give an accurate summary, then other people in that group may feel they have wasted their time.

As the facilitator, you need to be sensitive to these concerns. Explain your reasons for using small groups, and point out that some of the time will also be used in plenary.

Explain how feedback will happen. One pitfall to avoid is a situation where people in the small group feel misrepresented by the person feeding. You could ask them to agree a summary at the end of their discussion. Alternatively, people could contribute key points to the plenary as themselves, without an attempt to speak for the rest of their group.

Attribution #

Work from the following sources was reused:

• Facilitating Meetings by Seeds for Change (2019)