It’s Monday morning and you’ve invited your team into the large conference room for the kickoff meeting of a new design project. Whether you work in a corporate environment driven by time-to-market pressure or in an agency environment driven by clients, kickoff meetings follow a common pattern. You outline the project and the creative opportunity. The account manager or project lead talks about timelines and budget.

If there’s an executive present, she motivates the troops about the significance of the work to the company or the client. Everyone says the word collaborate at least once. But in the rush to exit the conference room and start the work, a few false assumptions can easily occur. . .

So begins many team efforts, and so begins our latest article, “Calibrate Before You Collaborate: 5 Questions to Guide Group Work” which  the Design Management Institute & Wiley Blackwell published in the latest issue of the DMI Review. The direct link to the abstract & access information is here.

The article sprung from our experience both managing product design and development teams and watching client teams take these fateful first steps together. When collaboration breaks down, when effective communications suffer, we often look back to how the work was started, and the assumptions, agreements, and expectations that were made (or not made) explicitly and implicitly.

In the article, we lay out five questions every team should explore at the start of a new work or project cycle. Like a creative or technical brief that defines what a team will do together, the questions play the important role of defining how the team will work together.

We’ll update this post next week with the direct link once it’s online, and our thanks to our colleagues at DMI for encouraging us to contribute.

In the meantime, we’re curious to learn how you and your teams start work. Feel free to share any wisdom learned in the comments section below.