Without a brief, everyone is just guessing

PART 2 IN A SERIES ABOUT THE PRACTICE OF CREATIVE BRIEFING

Every idea has a birth.

Before one arrives on the back of a cocktail napkin, or is blurted out to a fellow conspirator; before the lightbulb lights—there’s only fertility. Consider the moment just before Evan Spiegel conceived of Snapchat or the Coen Brothers began writing Barton Fink or you jot down a career-defining notion.

Nothing existed.

And then something did.

An idea arrived. How?

We visited the Fog, the “where” of idea-making, last time. The Fog is the chaotic laboratory, the endless factory floor, the cluttered studio, the context in which Idea People labor and ideas become manifest. Understanding the Fog helps us discern the business of creativity so we achieve better outcomes.

Now let’s try to deconstruct the birth itself—the messy, infinitesimal moment between zero and one. Then we’ll make our way to “how.”

It is and isn’t a miracle.

On the one hand, the phenomenon of any new idea is absurd. We just have them. Sometimes without asking. This defies much of how we imagine the world works. It often defies project managers and book publishers and anyone who depends on ideas happening on time and with specific quality.

Yes, you have dozens of ideas a day. You pitch a theory. Compose a persuasive sentence. Assemble the means to convert X to Y. Autonomous ideas are wonderful and boring. Our focus is on the pressure cooker.

“Have a specific, formidable idea now, please.”

Honestly, you might as well ask someone to grow an additional nose on demand. Whatever force or mechanism controls the release of once-in-a-lifetime, world-changing ideas does not care about time or pressure or need. It is beyond worldly concerns like deadlines and mortgages.

This is a challenging concept for (self described) “non-creative” business people. Because ideas are human, and because children have them all the time, and because having ideas seems like breathing—it is entirely rational to squint hard in disbelief when ideas aren’t just popping up on demand. Is the pressure not intense enough? Should the prize have more effulgence? This should be easy, right? “Ideas… come!” The writer Anne LaMott notices this tension when she kindly suggests, “Your unconscious can’t work when you are breathing down its neck.” In Bird by Bird, her gift to writing, LaMott notes, “The rational mind doesn’t nourish you. You assume that it gives you the truth, because the rational mind is the golden calf that this culture worships, but this is not true.” We can not rationalize a brilliant idea into being.

It makes for great drama, though.

The struggle. The fear. The begging. The loathing.

Would we have it any other way? Would they change the world if ideas were effortless?

Some Idea People seem to have it easier than others, but we hope they suffer in other ways.

Aha! You might think, so there is technique. And there is. Also, experience. And skill. And taste. Also talent. There are numerous means of out-foxing the muse, and doing the work. This is the other hand, the science and work ethic of ideas. There’s a reason the Writer’s Room exists—better to have a dozen brains sweating the assignment; all you need is one great solution.

All this to say, this business of world-changing ideas is fragile. It is often unreliable. We know literally nothing about how or why neurons fire as they do, when they do, to conjure the next great speech, the next industry-defining product, the next cultural shift or the next Best of Show at Cannes.

That is why the creative brief exists.

Without a brief, everyone is just guessing.

Without a brief, the job is a lot harder and more uncertain and less achievable.

Without a brief, we’re relying solely on magic. Or personality.

If your business requires world-changing ideas, consider the creative brief invaluable.

The brief is the beginning of “how”—the necessary baby steps setting the stage for the birth of an idea.

So what exactly is a “creative” brief?

In practical terms, the adjective often refers to a department or group of people—the creatives. The brief is written for them, to inspire and direct writers, art directors, designers. But the notion of a brief exists in architecture, policy, law, medicine, too—we’d like someone to create something, and so there’s a brief (and often a briefing): a document that summarizes things and sets the stage, before the Idea People venture off into the Fog.

Here’s a formula to set context:

Preparation (“The Brief”) + The Idea Space (“The Fog”) = Ideas

A brief prepares specific people to make a specific journey to (hopefully) return with ideas that address a specific problem.

Without the brief we typically end up with ideas that lack focus, aren’t relevant, miss context, or aren’t feasible for a host of reasons. In other words, we waste time and effort.

The brief matters because it sets the stage for the journey and the ideas that follow. In this way, the brief writing process is its own journey. One where those preparing to seek ideas can question, iterate, test and confirm all kinds of worthwhile insights and objectives.

Get the briefing right and you get world-changing ideas. This is where the adjective “creative” refers to the quality of the brief itself. Yet world-changing ideas are very rare. Why? I think it is, in part, the direct result of dramatically few world-changing creative briefs.

It is as hard to write a world-changing brief as it is to unearth a world-changing idea. To paraphrase the advertising legend Pat Fallon: “If the brief itself isn’t creative, what right does its author have to expect creativity?”

At its core, a brief is a conversation.

Briefing assumes at least two entities exist: the brief’s author(s) and the brief’s recipient(s). The dance between the two is essential, and charged. It has been portrayed as a skirmish, but that misunderstands the circumstance. Briefing, as a document and/or experience, initiates a search for something new, for a way to change the world. How can that not elicit energy? Every building, every book, every movie, every patent, every political movement began the same way—with a brief of one form or another, a conversation of some sort.

Another way misperceived tension shows up is in interpreting a brief as gospel, as dogmatic versus collegial. If the brief has all the answers, well—why are we even here?

A brief doesn’t solve the problem. It opens the door. Maybe many doors. Hopefully all of these doors will offer some form of surprise. The formula Brief + Fog = Ideas is not literal, nor does the first component necessarily indicate the result. If a brief portends to know all, you wouldn’t need a brief in the first place. It is a tricky thing to define just enough of an assignment so it inspires yet doesn’t sound the final notes. Howard Gossage suggests, “When baiting a trap with cheese, always leave room for the mouse.”

A brief is more than just words.

Briefing is an experience. Where it occurs has impact. How it occurs matters. Body language and props and the feeling of the space all effect the first steps into the Fog. The brief itself could be verbal, a narrative. It could be hours long. Or extremely succinct. It could include taste and touch and smell and sensation. Whatever provokes the gods is good.

The only wrong way to handle a brief is to not have one.

Most importantly, a brief is just the beginning.