I know from personal experience in volunteer work that I'm pretty comfortable orchestrating around 6 people including myself, and somewhere north of that I get overwhelmed by trying to keep so many plates spinning. I got blindsided with a group of visitors once and I thought my head was going to explode. We ended up having to re-do about a third of their work and another third over time. We came out net positive but most of the benefit went to them, if they had a good experience which I'm not sure I would have noticed either way. I really should have insisted on more help.
I don't actually know what my real limit is because I try a little too hard not to find out. Once bitten, twice shy. I'm sure at some point I'll be paid to find out, and I'll go as slow as they'll let me.
I’d say there’s a difference between orchestrating people and running meetings. You wouldn’t generally need to have a meeting with your whole team very often, presumably they have different roles and different goals that you can treat somewhat separately. And when you do need everyone in a room, you’d be better off running it as a presentation (ie, with all the prep and structure that comes with it).
(Stand ups, while arguably valuable, are like a series of short presentations, so IMO don’t count as meetings).
I've had several coworkers who felt strongly that the standup degenerates into repeating things that you should have put into the project management software.
I can't get the sentiment to stay put in the 'right' or 'wrong' column so it's always just sort of there bugging me, like a raspberry seed stuck in my teeth. As someone said either elsewhere in this thread or in another conversation recently, waiting until morning to tell people you're stuck is not an optimal solution. I tend to find that pain points are information, but I'm not sure what the clever solution is to this problem.
Both of these folks asserted we'd be better off spending some time discussing the ways in which we've gotten unstuck, as a counterpoint to talking about how we got stuck, as a more pro-active way of broadcasting hard-won knowledge to the group.
