Dan:
People are just very suspicious of what they’ve got themselves into basically. As I say, they look off that you’re going to get them to start playing twister or something.
Russell:
Shall we go on to how we use twister in meetings?
Dan:
Yes, twister in a kick-off meeting it just makes things quite cozy. If you can go right foot on green, what CMS are we going to be using.
Russell:
Definitely yeah. Once you’ve got a client in your armpit you guys are going to be good friends for the rest of the project.
Dan:
We also like the opposite game from everything going well and actually this is one that I’ll always do even with a client where I think the, “Let’s get our pencils out and start drawing” isn’t going to work or they’re just going to look at me like I’m insane in some of these quite formal scenarios. I’d like to do it as often as possible but sometimes you taste the room and feel this is going to go off badly. The other one is to say, “Okay let’s put ourselves six months in the future and everything’s gone wrong. This project hasn’t gone well.” And then say to them, “What is the most likely reason for that to have happened?” And it’s good. The context of that being in the future means that because it hasn’t happened the people are more honest. If you say to them, “What are you scared of with working with us?” That’s a slightly direct and almost people will be scared to tell you because they’ll be like, “I’m insulting someone.”
Whereas if you say, you put yourself in the scenario that has gone wrong and now tell me why? There’s something about that little leap of present tense to future tense.
Russell:
And also because you’re asking people to do a little bit of story telling it’s a more emotional component to it, I think you can’t always get when you ask someone directly than when you give someone a few minutes to consider how they’d feel about those things. That’s kind of different as well.
Dan:
It’s a fantastic opportunity to hear things about the organization. It may be that they’ll tell you, “It went wrong because we could never agree on a message internally.” You find out it’s not about you. They’ll often won’t say, “We think that you guys might do the worst web design that’s ever been produced.” They don’t say that. They’re confident that hasn’t happened. It’ll often be internal things, like we won’t be able to get sign off on it or the strategy’s wrong or we won’t ever be able to create this much content.
Russell:
Yeah exactly we’ve got to keep up.
Dan:
You just find out what they’re scared of there and that’s really useful. It’s a good opportunity for us to say what we’re worried about in again, in a way that’s not confrontational. We’ll often say, I’ll often use it as a chance to say, “I’m worried we’re taking on too much. It went wrong because we’re trying to do too many different things and we did none of them well rather than focusing. You can actually use it as a way of introducing some good design approach, just project approach stuff by keeping things simple like that. Introduce that as a kind of, “I’m worried that we’re not going to do that.” As part of a game. That always works really well.
Those are the various things that we’ve been doing in kick-off meeting. It’s worth saying that our kick-off meeting is not the same as everyone else’s.
Russell:
No definitely. It’s individual to the way we like to work.
Dan:
Exactly. You’re almost setting, you’re setting expectations with the client about how the project’s going to go and yeah, as we said at the beginning, you’re basically getting to know them.
Russell:
Yeah.