That was an interesting post and some thought-provoking comments.

Like a lot of you I view meetings as necessary but sometimes evil. 😉 I think the trick to reducing the "evil" is to keep the numbers small (both number of meetings and the number of people) and to have a clear agenda, or at least objectives.

Here's another thought... Does the number of people you invite reduce the probability of being able to hold the meeting at all? I was on a project where one of the managers liked to hold large meetings which he wanted to use to "communicate" with the team. His intentions were good. The problem was that people had other commitments and so didn't always attend the meetings. He finished up with poor communication. Because he had an analytical mind, I managed to convince him to try a different approach by plotting the family of curves:

ProbOfEveryoneAttending = (TypicalFreeAvailability) ** NumberOfPeople

If you say that people are committed to something else 20% of the time, then the chances of 8 people then the chances of everyone being able to attend at any particular time is 16%! (and I think 20% commitments is probably a low guess!)