I am sitting in a conference room with a notepad and pen- a cardboard coffee filled box as the table’s centerpiece, getting ready to kick off a several hour-long meeting with my new clients. My project manager and I will spend the majority of the time reviewing the clients answers to a questionnaire they filled out previous to the meeting; walking them through their goals, dreams and any foreseeable speed bumps with their new site. We have all the things we need to have a productive and insightful Q&A style meeting. We start off with asking them to explain the overall goals for the website. A few more questions in and I see about half of the eyes in the room glaze over. The topics are not boring- it’s just that the discovery process of one team getting to know another can be repetitive for a lot of people in the room.

So how can we get some of that creative energy that inspires collaboration and problem solving into that very first meeting with the client?

Break up the meeting with a hands-on activity! Gamestorming is a technique that has been around for decades originating in Silicon Valley and recently brain dumped on me at the UI15 conference in Boston by Dave Gray. Sketching ideas and prototyping is a technique designers and innovators use all the time, so why not use the same techniques when trying to get ideas from your clients? Plus you get people out of their seats and moving around by drawing, writing, posting and interacting with each other.

I am most excited to try out the Storyboard game at my next on-site client kick off. Although the conversation might step outside of the realm of the actual website we will build and could be considered more on the business strategy side, it will still be insightful in many ways. You will find out what motivates your group, discover common themes, and get to know the personalities in the room as you hear about how they envision the organizations future.

At the conference we were asked to participate in a little gamestorming by picking a current problem we were having and then illustrate as many solutions that we could think of to solve the problem.

1. Everyone in the group had to write down a problem on a sticky note.


2. Put the sticky notes in the middle of the table and have the group pick one problem and formulate it into a question.

3. Write the question at the top of a flip chart.

4. Sketch possible solutions to the problem (stick figures are encouraged) for 10-15 minutes (shorter time periods encourage quick thinking)

5. Go over ideas that everyone has.

6. Close the exercise with identifying some concrete things you can take away from the game. (Lessons learned, things you can include now, etc.)

Gamestorming is great because it gets everyone participating and everyone will feel valued and useful. It can also unveil personalities of the group in the room and encourages the team like mentality that you will need to get your project done. There is also the opportunity to create a game of your own that may apply a little better to your main objectives of the meeting. Either way the game is set up as a discovery process, you may not always be able to predict the outcome of the game.

Want even more great ideas for kick off meetings that have more of a design twist? Kevin M. Hoffman wrote a great article on A List Apart. Really into the idea? You can get your hands on Dave Gray's book.

**Second Photo/Illustration courtesy of Jason Robb.