Breakout Groups within meeting sessions

How to use breakouts to increase participation and ownership

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How you group people within a meeting or event has a big impact on the level of engagement and ownership within the meeting. And on the effectiveness and creativity of its outcomes. Breakout groups help to ensure that diverse perspectives are included. They also make it more likely that everybody is able to contribute. And that people are impacted by the meeting process.

Furthermore, changing the groupings as the meeting progresses provides more efficient progress, healthier relationships, and greater levels of engagement and energy. In fact, a great deal can be achieved with a few good questions and a variety of the breakout group options listed below.

Sadly however, most meetings tend to use only one, unchanging, grouping – all together. As a result, they miss out on much of the above. This article is intended to encourage you to ring some changes. In it we will cover:

Breakout grouping options, and what you can achieve with them
Key tips for enabling and managing breakout groups
Guidance on breakout recording and reporting

Grouping Options

So what breakout groupings are available to a meeting which wants to make use of this? (click the > symbol to read more)

Structured Breakout Groups

Pairs provide a really good way to ensure that everyone shares their thoughts. ... >
Getting people to share their ideas, and discuss them, it helps them to test their ideas. It also helps them to refine the wording to ensure that they are easy to understand. And it helps to build ownership for making contributions, and initial support for those contributions. It is important to set a time limit for doing this. This will help people remain focused on arriving at an answer.
Triplets provide the basis for a more structured and mediated exchange between people. ... >
In triplets, people can take on different roles (often speaker, coach and observer). They can then rotate through these roles so that everyone has a chance to share and work on their ideas. Having two people listen to and respond to your contributions has a number of advantages. It means the speaker receives more balanced feedback. And also more options for how they might move it forward.
Fours are a useful intermediate step between pairs and the whole group. ... >
It enables two pairs to get together, share the outputs from each pair, highlight any similarities and differences in those outputs, and then work together to understand the reasoning behind those similarities and differences, and arrive at a shared perspective to feed back to the main group.

Unstructured Breakout Groups

Small groups can be any size from 3 to 7 people (ideally, for the best balance of participation ... >
and consensus). The number of people depends on how many groups you need, and the size of the overall group. Small groups can work on developing answers in competition with each other, or on different aspects of the overall problem/solution. They have the advantage of being able to work faster and with better engagement than is possible in the larger group, and people can take on various roles within the group (facilitator, time-keeper, scribe, etc.) to ensure quality of output.
Walkround groups for a useful alternative to sharing things in plenary. ... >
The content to be reviewed is set up as a stall or display (sometimes hosted, and sometimes self-explanatory) and organised groups move from display to display according to a periodic pattern or timetable to discuss the content and provide feedback via the host or sticky notes. Further explanation of this mechanism can be found here.

Interacting Breakout Groups

Fishbowls are mechanisms where one group (or individual) in the centre is the focus of attention ... >
for all of the other groups (or individuals) on the periphery. Fishbowls enable the focus group to debate a topic (for example some area of expertise, their goals, how they work, a specified topic) and then for those around them to discuss that separately, raise questions and/or feedback, and submit it back to the focus group. This can be a powerful means to share best practice, experience and feedback.
Speed dating is a repeated version of pairs, where people meet in pairs for a brief period of time ... >
to discuss a particular topic, or share something about themselves, then split up and reform in new pairs for a set number of cycles. Sometimes the pairings are random based on proximity and chance, and sometimes they follow a pattern, such as two concentric circles moving on one partner at a time.
Roof discussions are like speed dating for groups such that every group meets every other group ... >
in sequence. This is very useful for project groups looking to identify possible points of conflict or synergy, or for work groups to improve internal customer service between them. Further information on roof discussions can be found in Chapter 7 of How To Build a Better Business.
1-2-4-All is a sequence (sometimes repeated) which has been proven effective by LS ... >
(Liberating Structures) and is used to generate and bring together perspectives on a particular question or topic. The model is to (1) work for a minute or two individually to clarify your own perspective on the topic (2) to meet in pairs and share those perspectives (4) to join pairs together into fours to develop further insight through similarities and differences (All) to feedback the highlights in plenary.

Not-Really Breakouts

Plenary is the whole overall group together (the typical format of most traditional meetings). ... >
Plenary is very useful for developing one answer, and for engaging everyone in the decision (and the ownership) of what emerges. However, where the overall group size is greater than eight, it is easy to find that some people dominate, and others cease to contribute, and this can undo all of the psychologically important work done in smaller groups to ensure diversity and ownership. To overcome this, it is important to ensure that everyone can see their contributions in the final picture (so it is important to balance verbal and visual outcomes) and to have a fair process by which everyone can see that their contribution has been heard and respected.
Individual working is one of the most powerful mechanisms of engagement, ... >
and is a very useful mechanism for ensuring a richness of input and participation in any subsequent grouping. Individual grouping is usually very brief – 1 to 5 minutes – but it helps to ensure that people access their own minds rather than wait for others to speak and carry things forward. An example of using this is to ask the group: “Before we discuss this collectively (or in groups) please note down individually two answers that are important to you on a sticky note”. Ask people to look up when they have finished, and when they all have, move on to the next grouping.

Enabling and Managing Breakouts

Enabling Breakout Groups

In physical meetings, enabling breakout groups is largely a matter of making sure that you have enough space to move around. And about selecting the right arrangement of the furniture (or getting rid of it altogether).

But the increase of virtual meetings has actually made organising breakout groups a lot easier. Virtual meeting software like Zoom and Teams now make it very easy to facilitate breakout groups. And to shift quickly from one grouping to another at the click of a mouse. Increasingly, they also provide options where people can self-select into groups. This makes it easier for people to sort out the structured group options themselves.

Technical guidance on how to do this within your software is still evolving in most cases. But it is easy to find the latest instructions by googling the name of your software and the word ‘breakouts’.

Managing Breakouts

A lot of time can be lost in breakouts through a lack of guidance and clear instructions. Therefore it is really important to ensure people know exactly what they will be doing and how long they have to do it. We would therefore encourage you to reflect on the following suggestions:

Keep instructions very clear and simple. Ideally post them in the chat before people go to breakouts. Or, if you are using whiteboards (which we would heartily encourage), write them there. Straightforward questions work really well. Check that people are clear on the instructions and time before you break them out.
Ensure people are aware of the timing. If you are using Google Jamboard within your breakout groups (see below) there is a great range of timers that you can include for them.
Appoint someone in each group to act as the leader (facilitator). Or make the team’s selection of such a person their first task. The leader’s role will be to keep people focused on the task, and running to time. Failure to appoint a leader from the outset will waste time.
If you can, quietly drop in on each of the groups in turn to check things are going as you imagine. Or, if you are using a whiteboard, keep an eye on whether/what things are being added. This will enable you to see if you need to drop in. And which are priorities.
If things are going wrong for one particular group, you may need to spend some time there. If things are going wrong for many groups, you may need to reset. In which case bring the breakouts back together. Find out what is going wrong, clarify new guidance, and break them out again.
Towards the end of the time, pop round the groups and ask them if they are okay to finish in x minutes. If they need extra time, it may be more efficient to give the time than to accommodate incomplete outputs. If you need to give extra time, check if that will work for the other groups.

Breakout Recording and Reporting

Recording Breakout Activity

Breakouts are all about increasing participation and ownership of the outcomes. Back in the 70s and 80s when the Japanese initiated their quality revolution, they made one vitally important choice. The tools they use could all be done on a flipchart. This ensured that every member of each group could: feel fully engaged; see progress; check shared understanding; and confirm the output. It made a huge difference.

We believe in the same principle for breakout groups. Visual recording is not just for communicating back, it is for communicating within. It clarifies what is currently agreed; keeps people up to speed; ensures shared conclusions. Groups that work around a shared visual component, particularly one to which they can all contribute, generate better outputs and greater commitment.

In virtual meetings therefore it is vital that each group have a shared document. Ideally one within which they are equally empowered to contribute. If you are just starting down this path we would recommend Google’s Jamboard.

Reporting Breakout Activity

Having multiple groups report back verbally can be tedious in the extreme. All too easily, it drifts toward a blow-by-blow rerun of their discussion, even when it repeats what another group said. As a result it can waste a lot of time. Therefore, if you are going to use verbal feedback, we would propose:

Set a time or a point limit. For example “In sixty seconds …” or “Just your two main points …”
Ask people not to repeat. For example “Just tell us any differences in your conclusions …” or “Anything fresh from your group …”

Using visual feedback (augmented by comments perhaps) can be a much more powerful and efficient option. In physical breakouts this is usually done by means of a sheet of flipchart paper.

Virtual meetings provide a much better option. In virtual meetings, the same impact can be had more readily by means of a whiteboard.

One particular whiteboard that lends itself brilliantly to this is Google’s Jamboard. It is fast, intuitive, simple to use. And it provides separate sheets for each group and an easy way for everyone to navigate between them. For more on this see Using Jamboard in Breakout Groups.

Track your progress to ensure the efficacy of this strategy.