Aug 5, 2010
Four Great Questions
Kevin Hoffman has an article this month in A List Apart that contains a lot of common sense dos and don’ts for kick-off meetings. Many of his suggestions are simple, and reflect standards that we hold ourselves too.
He provides four sample questions that are well worth remembering for a kick-off meeting:
- “What is the one thing we must get right to make this website/application worth undertaking?”
- “How does your organization define success? What is the role of the website/application in achieving that success?”
- “What aspects of the internal culture or external environment could put this redesign/application at risk to fail?”
- “(Follow up question) Assuming we mitigate that risk, what would exceed your wildest dreams?”
I think there’s a lot of promise in the facilitation games he suggests for design-oriented kick-off meetings. I can imagine those activities engaging a large group and at the same time giving them sympathy for the challenges that designers confront. It’s easy for a client to imagine himself as a brilliant creative mind until confronted with pencil and blank sheet of paper.
It looks like his site GoodKickoffMeetings.com is stocked with plenty more good ideas for facilitation games. I could invest a lot of time there.