Good Kickoff Meetings

If you work at a design agency, government agency, university, for-profit, not for-profit, or even a wish-I-had-profit, you break your work down into projects. And every project has to start somewhere; traditionally we call those first meetings “kickoff meetings.”

The best thing about the metaphor of a football kickoff is not that it simulates a time in the game where the game is just beginning, but the fact that it’s simplicity is deceptive. The reality of a kickoff is that a lot of analysis and preparation happens off of the field before a team ever first lays a foot to the ball. For some reason, that amount of thought and effort doesn’t traditionally go into project kickoffs.

At my job, we decided to undertake a different approach to kickoff meetings, applying design thinking and interactive exercises to develop a kickoff framework that was more similar to a playbook of activities we could pull from to begin to define and begin to solve problems for clients. We are in the business of creating experiences for the web, and although these exercises are designed to support that type of process, you might find them useful in putting together kickoffs for a variety of types of projects.

Whether one of these ideas is useful to you, or you are planning multi-day, 60 plus person kickoffs, I hope you find this site helpful in your process of building trust, energy, and culture around a successful project beginning.