The brief is not the problem

Strategy

12 Jun 2026

6 min read

Clients hand you a brief and a problem, and they are rarely the same document. We spend the first week telling them apart, which is why we stopped calling it a kick-off.

A brief is written by the person who has to get it approved. That is not a criticism, it is a description of the form. By the time it reaches us it has been through a budget conversation, a committee and at least one attempt to sound ambitious, and each of those passes moves it further from the thing that is actually going wrong.

So we read it twice. Once for what it asks for, and once for what it is defending.

We do not present anything in week one. We sit in on whatever is already happening — a sales call, a support queue, a Monday stand-up — and we write down the words people use when they are not performing for us. Nine times out of ten the problem already has a name inside the company, and it is not the name in the brief.

On a recent engagement the brief asked for a repositioning. Four days in we had this instead:

None of that is a positioning problem in the sense the brief meant. All four were fixed by writing one page and deleting nine.

The brief tells you what the organisation can already say out loud. The problem is usually the thing it cannot.

Studio note, first-week review

We write the restated problem in one paragraph and send it before any work begins. It is uncomfortable, because it often reads as a correction and the person who wrote the brief is usually in the room. We have learned to send it anyway, and to send it in week one rather than week five when it costs money to be right.

The response tells you a great deal. If it comes back with additions, the brief was a summary and everyone knew it. If it comes back with a defence, there is a decision inside the company that has not been made yet, and the project will stall on it later whether we name it now or not.

About a third of the time the brief was correct and we say so. That is a good outcome too, and it takes four days to establish rather than four weeks.

Pl. 02  Restated brief, first pass

We stopped running discovery workshops as the opening move. A workshop produces the group’s official answer, which is generally the brief again with more sticky notes attached. We now do the workshop in week three, when there is something specific to disagree with.

We also stopped asking clients what success looks like. It is a fair question that produces unusable answers. We ask what would have to stop happening, and people answer that one immediately and in detail.

Ask for the previous attempt. Almost every brief is the second or third try at the same problem, and the earlier attempts are the most honest document in the building. They are rarely offered, and always available if you ask.