A few weeks back I got to see design icon Michael Wolff speak about youthful thinking, and somehow he ended up talking about his definition of a creative brief. I was struck by the distilled simplicity of how he put it:

A creative brief is the best chance someone has to explain what they want from you.

So simple. So obvious. Maybe even disappointingly obvious, coming from someone so smart and experienced. Except there are two ways to look at it.

A creative brief is the best chance someone has to explain what they want from you. But most importantly, a creative brief is the best chance someone has to explain what they want from you. A concrete request born out of a possibility. And possibilities imply alternatives.

I’m currently reading “Decisive” by Dan and Chip Heath, where they explore among others the main flaws in our decision systems. Among them, emotional attachment, confirmation bias or simple narrow framing. But the research is clear: biologically, we suck at defining problems.

So why should we consider that the very best brief we can come up with is the very best brief there is?

Strategy happens when we have infinite alternatives and finite resources. By definition it implies choices and therefore trade-offs, making its outcome never guaranteed (and often unexpected).

A briefing works the same way: we trade focus for costs of opportunity, which means there’s a chance that the briefing might be wrong.

It takes a lot of humility to admit this, arguably a rare trait in the marketing and advertising industry. It makes sense: our job, broadly speaking, is to prove that we or our clients are better than our competitors. We thrive because we’re not afraid to think like a predator.

And yet, it’s that same level of humility that might make us better at our jobs. By accepting that there is a chance we might be wrong in how we frame a problem, we’re not opening ourselves to criticism, we’re opening ourselves to alternative. In a world of “get shit done”, problems have an attention deficit and poorly defined problems inevitably come back to bite us in the ass.

In short, our egos are often in the way of our best work.

A good briefing, then, is also the result of how much humility we put into it. Only by acknowledging our natural inability to frame a problem can we allow ourselves to be open to new interpretations, better questions, and more interesting (and often unexpected) solutions.

Or creativity, as some people call it.