The meeting was scheduled for ninety minutes. Eleven people were invited. Three of them were optional but attended anyway because declining a kickoff meeting is a career-limiting move in most organizations. The agenda consisted of four bullet points that could have been written in a paragraph. The actual information exchanged could have been transmitted via email in under four minutes. Instead, ninety-three minutes later, everyone returned to their desks having learned nothing they could not have read, with the added bonus of having lost the best part of a Tuesday morning. This is the kickoff meeting. It is the creative industry’s most expensive theatrical tradition.
The Anatomy of a Meeting That Should Not Exist
The kickoff meeting typically begins with introductions. Everyone states their name and role, including the people who have worked together for three years and are on the same Slack channel. Then someone shares a brief overview of the project — information that was in the briefing document that was circulated beforehand and that approximately forty percent of the attendees have read.
Then comes the timeline slide. The timeline shows a series of arrows moving from left to right, with phase names and dates. Several people take photos of the slide with their phones. The same information exists in the project management tool, in the email thread, and in the Notion page, but the photo provides psychological comfort that is difficult to replicate digitally.
Then questions. The questions are of two varieties: the ones that were answered in the briefing document (asked by the forty percent who didn’t read it) and the ones that reveal a fundamental unresolved issue with the project scope (asked by the one person in the room who actually does things). The second type of question triggers a twenty-minute conversation that the project manager attempts to conclude with “let’s take this offline,” which is meeting-language for “this problem is too large for this setting but we will add it to a parking lot and never revisit it.”
The meeting ends. Action items are assigned. The minutes are circulated the following day. Nobody reads them because the meeting was already about something everybody already knew.
Why Organizations Keep Having Them
The kickoff meeting persists not because it is useful but because it performs a function that is social rather than informational. It is a ritual of collective acknowledgment — a ceremony in which the team officially agrees that the project exists, that the timeline is real, and that everyone is, at least notionally, aligned. This alignment is largely fictional, but the fiction is useful enough to justify the meeting’s existence.
There is also the political dimension. For many stakeholders, the kickoff meeting is the only moment in a project when they are visibly present. They attend, they ask one strategic question that signals seniority, and they leave. The meeting is their participation in a project they will not otherwise touch until the presentation. Removing it would make invisible their contribution to a process they are being paid to oversee.
Finally, there is institutional inertia. The kickoff meeting exists because it has always existed. It is baked into templates, into project methodologies, into the expectations of clients who have experienced enough projects to know that this is how projects begin. Suggesting that the meeting is unnecessary requires someone to make that argument, and making that argument costs political capital that most people would prefer to spend elsewhere. So the meeting persists.
The Hidden Cost Nobody Calculates
Here is a calculation that project managers rarely perform. Eleven people in a meeting for ninety minutes. Average fully-loaded hourly cost per person, across seniority levels: approximately €75. Total cost of the meeting: roughly €1,237. For the transmission of information that exists in a four-page document. Per project. Per kickoff. Multiply that by the number of kickoff meetings in your organization over the course of a year, and you have a number that would make the finance department briefly interesting.
This is the kind of metric that the KPI Shark was designed to surface — not the vanity metrics that make quarterly reports look good, but the real operational costs that everyone accepts because the alternative is a difficult conversation about how the organization actually works. Sometimes the most useful KPI is the one that counts what the meeting costs rather than what it achieves.
What a Good Kickoff Actually Looks Like
The kickoff meeting is not inherently evil. It can serve a legitimate purpose when the project is genuinely complex, when stakeholders are meeting for the first time, or when there are decisions that require real-time negotiation that cannot be resolved asynchronously. These situations exist. They are, however, not as common as the default assumption that every project requires a ninety-minute meeting before work can begin.
A genuinely efficient kickoff has three characteristics. First, it contains only the people who have decisions to make or information to contribute that cannot be written down in advance. Second, it runs against an agenda with actual questions, not a slide deck with answers to questions nobody asked. Third, it ends with three or fewer decisions, clearly recorded, with owners and dates. Everything else is information that can be written down and read at a time of the recipient’s choosing.
The most radical thing a creative leader can do is send a comprehensive briefing document with a note: “If you have questions after reading this, let’s schedule fifteen minutes. Otherwise, we begin on Thursday.” Some clients will insist on the meeting anyway. But some will be quietly, profoundly grateful — because they also have Tuesdays they would prefer not to lose.
If your Tuesday is already fully booked with meetings about meetings, the NoBriefs Club shop has what you need to survive the sprint. At least you’ll be wearing something honest.
