When thinking about writing this, I had a few ideas about the kind of person that has a lot of experience, and a lot of protocols they need to follow, but the reason they’re good at their job is because they know, deep down, they need to follow the rules, deliver the plan, and be constantly on the lookout for things that pop up in the moment.
A dad at a soft play… been there. A jazz drummer listening to the guitarist going long… I wish.
Anyone who knows me knows I love a metaphor – so this article is brought to you by the metaphor that you should run a project kickoff meeting like a paramedic.
Hold your list loosely
Write a list before every kickoff meeting.
Not an agenda, exactly. A list of the things you want to confirm, the things you want to raise, and the things you want to own before you leave the room. The paramedic equivalent is the protocol. They know it cold. They could recite it at three in the morning. And the moment they arrive on scene, they start adapting it.
Hold the list loosely. Sometimes you get through all of it. Sometimes the meeting tells you something more important than anything on the list. But always have it.
Most people don’t. Most treat the first working meeting as a formality. A chance to say hello properly, run through the brief, agree some dates, and get going. It feels productive. It feels collaborative. And it almost always leaves at least three things unresolved that will cause problems in week four.
The first meeting is not admin. It is the whole project in miniature. How it runs, who prepares, who defers, who fills the silences, who owns the actions at the end: all of it tells you almost everything about how the next three months will go.
Confirm the obvious out loud.
A paramedic arrives and confirms the basics before doing anything else. Name. Age. What happened. Things the person calling the ambulance already told the dispatcher. They confirm them anyway.
Do the same.
In almost every kickoff, there is at least one thing everyone assumed was agreed and nobody had actually confirmed. A scope boundary. A decision-maker. A deadline one side thought was fixed and the other thought was approximate. Not failures of intelligence. Failures of explicitness. Be the idiot – ask the question – confirm the obvious – but do it quick.
Checking feels slow. It feels like you’re insulting people’s preparation. Do it anyway. The thirty seconds it takes is worth considerably more than the week you’ll spend unpicking the misunderstanding later.
Raise the awkward stuff early.
Money. Delays. The person who should be in the room but isn’t. The thing everyone knows is a problem and nobody wants to be the first to mention.
A paramedic doesn’t wait until the patient is in the ambulance to mention the nearest hospital is forty minutes away. They say it at the scene, calmly, so everyone can plan around it.
Mention it. Not aggressively. Frame it generously, as something you want to get ahead of together. The awkward conversation in week one is a practical conversation. The same conversation in week six is a crisis.
Try saying: there are a couple of things I want to raise now so they don’t become issues later. That framing does most of the work. It signals that you are organised, that you have thought ahead, and that you are on their side.
Tell clients what to do. And what not to do.
Clients want to be helpful. They will copy you into emails you don’t need. They will send documents at eleven at night with a note saying just in case this is useful. None of it is malicious. All of it costs time.
A paramedic on scene tells bystanders exactly what to do. Hold this. Keep them talking. Stand back. Not because bystanders are unhelpful, because unhelpful help makes things worse.
The kickoff is the right moment to tell clients how to work with you. What you need and when. What you’ll handle and what requires their input. Not as a list of demands. As a way of helping them help you well. Clients who know what good looks like get better outcomes. That is not a coincidence.
Establish ownership before anyone touches anything.
Every piece of work has something that falls between two people. Name all of it. Who owns this? Who makes this call? If this isn’t ready by this date, who flags it?Ownership conversations feel bureaucratic until the moment something goes wrong and nobody owns it. Have them before anything is at stake. They are much more comfortable then.
Leave with actions on both sides.
A paramedic doesn’t leave the scene with a list of things the hospital is going to do. They hand over with clarity on both sides. This is what we did. This is what you need to do next. Confirmed by both.
A kickoff that ends with a list of things you are going to do is not a kickoff. It is a briefing. Leave with commitments on both sides, dates attached to both.
It also tells you something immediately useful about how the client operates. The client who completes their actions before the next meeting is a different project to the one who doesn’t.
The contract is where the project is agreed. The kickoff is where it actually starts.
Everything that follows, is shaped by what happens in that first working meeting. Most people treat it as a threshold to cross on the way to the real work.
It is the real work.
