Last Tuesday I sat in a ninety minute kickoff with fourteen people on a video call, and by minute eighty everyone had agreed. The word premium came up nine times. I know because I have started counting.
The founder meant premium as in price. The head of product meant premium as in materials and finish. The person who runs paid social meant premium as in the audience she wants to reach, which is a third thing entirely. Nobody disagreed with anybody, because nobody had said anything specific enough to disagree with.
Everyone nodded. We scheduled the next one.
Consensus in a kickoff is not alignment. It is the sound of a room where nothing has yet been made concrete enough to argue about.
This got noticeably worse over the last ten months, and I do not think it fixes itself. In a conference room, disagreement leaks. Somebody shifts in a chair, somebody half interrupts, somebody catches your eye across the table. On video there is no half interrupt. Turn taking is serial and polite, mute swallows the small objection before it becomes a sentence, and the person who was going to push back decides it is not worth the awkwardness of unmuting to do it. Remote work did not invent fake agreement. It removed the friction that used to expose it.
Three fixes, none of them clever.
One, write the definitions down while people are still on the call. Not the goals, the words. If premium is in the brief, the brief has to say what premium means here and what it costs us. Two, force a tradeoff instead of a vision. Ask what the brand is willing to be worse at. Oatly is deliberately annoying to a large number of people, and somebody had to say that out loud in a room before it could be true on a carton. Three, name a decider and a date for every open question before anyone leaves. Agreement with no owner decays into a second kickoff.
Here is the part that gets lost. The kickoff is not where you build enthusiasm. Enthusiasm is free and it evaporates by February. The kickoff is where you spend your single moment of maximum access to senior people on the least fun conversation available, which is the one about what you are giving up.
Agreement with no owner decays into a second kickoff.
I used to do karaoke twice a month in a sticky basement bar in Southeast Portland, back when that was a thing a person could do, and the host called everybody baby and never once let the room agree on a song for more than nine seconds. Somebody always wanted something else and said so immediately, loudly, before the intro finished. I have come to believe that room was better run than most kickoffs I have ever sat in.