The under-discussed value of writing a brief

A while ago, I was talking to the head of marketing for a pretty cool startup. They mentioned one of the big challenges their team had was writing briefs. Didn’t surprise me, as most people don’t really do it.

Now, I'd assume the deeper consequence of this was that things would go undocumented. And therefore knowledge share within the organisation was not really working, because no one bothered to write anything down.

He, instead, made a much wiser and simpler point. He argued that this was less to do with documenting information, and more to do with helping people think through the things they’re asking others to do. In short, the exercise of writing the brief, for him, is as valuable as the document itself.

This was a lovely moment to pause. It echoes stuff that Rory Sutherland’s talked about the creative process in advertising helping you generate all sorts of ideas that could very well transpire outside of the advertising. The process, in short, is more valuable than simply the result it leads to.

So, based on this, I started seeing briefs in a slightly more sophisticated way that go beyond ‘it needs to be written otherwise we can’t evaluate the work’. Though, of course, that is an equally valid reason to write actual briefs.

But there’s a deeper layer to it. The document itself is there to give clarity to everyone on the project, without a doubt. But before that happens, the writing of the document is there to give its author clarity first. And once you have that, everything else tends to flow much smoother later on.