First real kickoff since the Fourth. Ten in the morning, a conference room in the Pearl with the blinds down because of the glare, nine people, forty-one slides. Ovation coffee on the credenza, which was the best thing that happened in that room, and I am not being glib.
By eleven thirty I knew the engagement was in trouble, and I could not have pointed to a single wrong thing anyone said.
That is the trouble with kickoffs. Nothing goes wrong in them. Everyone is warm, everyone is prepared, the deck is well built, and the failure that surfaces in month four was fully assembled in the first ninety minutes while the room was being pleasant to itself.
Every doomed engagement I have worked on was already doomed at kickoff, and it was doomed by three omissions so polite that naming them out loud feels like bad manners.
One. Nobody names the decider. There is a room full of stakeholders and a sponsor who says the team is fully empowered, and there is not one sentence in the notes identifying who signs off on positioning. Six weeks later you learn it was somebody who was never in the room. I have watched this from inside brand strategy rooms more times than I want to write down.
Two. The brief is a wish list wearing a brief's clothes. Modernize the brand. Reach a younger audience. Keep the core customer. Differentiate. Do not alienate anyone. Every item defensible on its own. The set of them impossible. Nobody forces a choice at kickoff because forcing a choice at kickoff feels premature, and it is not premature. It is the job.
Three. The room agrees on success without writing it down. Somebody says we will know it when we see it, and everyone nods, because that sounds like taste. It is not taste. It is a blank check written to whoever is most senior in the review four months from now.
The fix is unglamorous and takes twenty minutes. Ask who signs. Ask which of the five goals loses when two of them collide, and make somebody answer out loud. Ask what number or what sentence, six months out, means this worked. Write the answers on the wall where everyone can see them, and refuse to move to the timeline slide until they are there.
You will be the annoying person in the room. Be the annoying person in the room. The alternative is being the agreeable person in a meeting that quietly ends the project.
It is a blank check written to whoever is most senior in the review four months from now.
I came home and told Barnaby all of this while he sat in the sink. He has never once asked me to define success, which may be why we get along.