I have run the same kickoff meeting four times in three weeks. Different clients, different categories, the same ninety minutes. Everyone introduces themselves. Somebody fights the projector. The most senior person in the room says they want to be bold, and eleven people write down the word bold.
By the fourth one I had stopped taking notes on what was being said and started taking notes on the room.
Who talked. Who did not. Who looked at the CMO before answering a question about their own department.
Every strategy failure I have watched was already sitting in that first meeting, fully formed, wearing a name tag.
The kickoff is not where you collect information, it is where the project's real constraints show themselves, and if you do not name them out loud in the first ninety minutes you will spend four months discovering them one at a time.
Three things I watch for now.
One, the person who is not in the room. There is always someone with veto power who could not make it. Sales. The founder. A regional GM. Everything you build will eventually be carried into that person's office by somebody who is not you. If they are absent from the kickoff they will be present at the end, and they will be the end.
Two, the decision that has already been made. Sometimes the new packaging is at the printer. Sometimes the media plan is signed. Sometimes the agency was chosen because the CMO worked with them at a previous job. The work is not to expose this. The work is to know it, so you do not spend six weeks building a recommendation that was never actually available.
Three, the word nobody defines. Premium. Modern. Elevated. Someone says it in the first twenty minutes, everyone nods, and it turns out four people meant four different things. I have watched this from inside brand strategy rooms and that disagreement always surfaces later, at the worst possible moment, disguised as a comment about a font.
The fix is not a longer meeting. It is one uncomfortable question, asked early and out loud: what would have to be true for this project to fail?
Every strategy failure I have watched was already sitting in that first meeting, fully formed, wearing a name tag.
People answer that question. They answer it in detail. They have been waiting the whole hour for somebody to ask, and the answers are the actual brief, which is why they never make it into the deck version.
Truffles sat on my laptop for eleven minutes while I prepped the fourth one and refused to be moved. Barnaby supervised from the windowsill and declined to intervene. Neither of them surfaced a constraint, but at least they were honest about their positions.