Ask anyone what stayed with them after a leadership program and you'll often hear the same answer: the best part was the peers. The small-group conversations, the relief of hearing someone else wrestle with the same hard problem, the hour that didn't feel like training at all. When peers come together around real problems with a structure that holds, they get further than any of them would alone — it's one of the most consistent findings in how adults actually learn.
The catch is that peer learning rarely happens on its own. The channel you set up after the off-site goes quiet in three weeks. "Meet your group between sessions" turns into nobody booking the call. The cohort that had three peer sessions on paper had one in real life. The format isn't the problem — what usually breaks is that the meetings are left to hope: hope they book it, hope they show up, hope someone leads.
In Knowly, the Group meeting activity is built for exactly this — peer-driven but structured, so a group can meet and work through a real task without you sitting in to facilitate each one. You add it to a learning journey, write one brief, and participants meet in small groups around it.
If you'd rather start with the mechanics, how to create a group meeting and how to divide participants into groups walk through the setup. This article is about the harder part: designing the meeting so the groups actually meet.
Whether a peer group meets or quietly fizzles usually comes down to four things, wired together. Get all four right and the meetings run themselves. Miss one and you're back to hoping.
Put the right people in each group
A peer conversation only goes somewhere when the people in the room recognise each other's problems. So compose the groups on purpose: same kind of role, same kind of challenge, people who can speak candidly with one another. Keep a manager and their own direct report out of the same circle — candor drops the moment someone's boss is listening.
When you set up the groups, you decide how many there are and who lands where — assigned automatically or arranged by hand when the mix matters. Get the composition right and the conversation has somewhere to go. Get it wrong and people sit in polite silence, and no agenda saves it.
Give the group an agenda it can run without you
The reason a peer group doesn't need a facilitator is that a good brief does the facilitator's job. Write the meeting so the group can run it themselves: bring a real situation, help each other think it through, and leave having each committed to one thing to try before the next meeting. That simple loop — real problem, peer input, a commitment — is what turns a nice chat into practice that changes something.
Keep it concrete enough that no one has to ask you what to do. Tips for writing a group meeting brief covers how to make it land, and four formats you can copy — leadership triads, coaching pairs, case discussions — give you a running start.
Let deadlines and reminders do the chasing
Meetings get booked because a deadline lands in a busy inbox, not because you keep nudging. So lean on that instead of your own follow-up: give the meeting a booking deadline, and let each group's leader carry the responsibility to pick a time and get everyone there. The prompts arrive on their own, at the moment there's something to act on.
This is the piece that scales. One person can keep a hundred peer groups moving at once precisely because the chasing isn't manual — the booking deadline lives in the group meeting, and the group leader gets the prompts rather than you.
Close the loop so you can see it happened
After the meeting, have the group leader confirm it took place and write back a short note on what the group discussed — a paragraph, not a transcript. That closing step does two quiet jobs: it gives you visibility into what's actually happening across every group, without anyone feeling watched, and it tells the group that the meeting mattered enough to be noticed. The group leader handles the confirmation and the note, and you can read back what each group reported.
Get these four right — the right people, an agenda that holds, deadlines that chase, a loop that closes — and peer learning stops being something you hope for and becomes something you can count on. You're not delivering a suggestion to meet. You're delivering the meeting.
And if you want peer learning to run continuously rather than as one timed cohort, a peer sprint takes the admin off your plate entirely. People sign themselves up, the groups form on their own by the composition rules you set, and each group starts the moment enough people have joined — so peer learning keeps happening without you building a single group by hand or waiting for everyone to start on the same day.