Twenty minutes into the kickoff, everyone had agreed. The objective slide said grow consideration among younger buyers, eight people nodded, and we moved on to timelines with most of the hour still left. I wrote the word aligned in my notebook. I have started crossing that word out when I write it.
Eight weeks later the work came back and the room came apart. The marketing lead wanted a number to move in a tracker. The founder wanted to stop being described as the cheap one. The head of sales wanted something a distributor could be handed. All three of them had nodded at the same sentence.
They were not lying to me in March. They were reading.
Agreement in a kickoff is usually three people hearing three different sentences and nodding at the same slide.
This happens because a kickoff is a social event before it is a working one. Everyone is being polite, the relationship is four days old, and the objective gets written broad enough that nobody has to be the person who slows the meeting down. Broad language is cheap to agree to and expensive to execute. The bill comes due at the first review, when the work finally has edges.
So I have three questions now, and none of them is what are your goals.
One. What are we willing to stop doing. Objectives are free. Tradeoffs are not, and the first honest disagreement in any project shows up right here.
Broad language is cheap to agree to and expensive to execute.
Two. What would have to be true in a year for you personally to call this a success. Personally is doing all the work in that sentence. People will defend a company objective politely and a personal one honestly, and the gap between those two answers is most of what I get paid for.
Three. Who is going to hate this. There is always someone. A regional manager, a legal reviewer, a founder's spouse. Finding out in week one costs nothing. Finding out in week nine costs the project.
Then I write the disagreement down and put it in the deck. Not the resolution, the disagreement, with names and a date. A recorded conflict is the most useful artifact a strategy engagement produces, because it is the only thing that stops the room from re-litigating in month three and calling it new feedback.
None of this makes the kickoff pleasant. A good one should end with somebody mildly annoyed and everybody clearer.
There is a host at the karaoke place I go to in Southeast who calls everyone baby and asks exactly one question when you hand in your slip. Are you singing this one for real, baby. It is a sharper kickoff question than most of mine, and nobody has ever been able to nod at it.