The average Fortune 1000 company has more than 30,000 employees and engineering, sales and marketing teams with hundreds of members. Equally large teams exist in government, science and defense organizations. And yet, research shows that the ideal size for a productive real-time conversation is only about 4 to 7 people.The reason is simple: As groups grow larger, each person has less opportunity to speak and must wait longer to respond, increasing their frustration that their views are not sufficiently considered. This is true whether groups collaborate in person, by video or teleconference, or even by text chat (which buries users in a backlog of messages that reduce participation and undermine deliberation). Simply put, productive team conversations do not scale.So, what do you do if you have a large team and you want to leverage their knowledge, wisdom, insight and expertise? For many organizations, their only choice is to resort to polls, surveys or interviews. This will capture data about individual perspectives, but nobody will “feel heard” when the process is over, and it will rarely find optimal solutions.This is because polls, surveys and interviews are not deliberative instruments. There is no give and take as team members debate issues, provide reasons and rationales, present arguments and counterarguments and ultimately converge on solutions by virtue of their deliberative merits. Surveys treat people as over-simplified data points, while interactive conversations treat people as thoughtful data processors. This difference is profound.I have been studying this issue for more than a decade, and I’m convinced that the best way to unlock the true collective intelligence of large teams is through authentic real-time conversations at scale. I am talking about thoughtful discussions where scores of people can brainstorm, prioritize and forecast together, ultimately converging on solutions that genuinely leverage their combined knowledge, wisdom and i …
