I’ve worked from briefs that were two pages long and briefs that were two lines. The length never predicted the outcome. What mattered was whether anyone in the room had actually thought about the problem before handing it over.
Most briefs aren’t really briefs. They’re solutions wearing a brief’s clothing. “We need a redesign of the onboarding flow” sounds like a starting point. It isn’t. It’s a conclusion someone reached before the conversation started, and from that moment your job becomes narrower than it should be.
This is one of the more persistent frictions in design practice. Not the work itself. The conditions the work starts in.
I spent years trying to fix briefs by asking better questions at kickoff. That helped, but it treated a structural problem like a communication problem. The real issue is that in most organisations, design enters the process after the framing has already happened. Strategy has been set. Budgets allocated. A solution quietly agreed. Design gets handed the execution and told, with genuine enthusiasm, that there’s real creative freedom here.
There isn’t. Not really. Not at the level that would change anything important.
The brief, in those cases, is a ceremony. A handover document for a decision that’s already been made.
So what do you actually do with that?
The first thing I learned to stop doing was fighting it directly. Walking into a kickoff and saying “I think we’re solving the wrong problem” is technically correct and practically useless. It puts people on the defensive before you’ve built any trust, and it positions you as the person who creates friction rather than the person who creates value. Neither is fair, but both are real.
What works better is getting curious before getting critical. Not performing curiosity. Actually being curious about how this brief came to exist. Who shaped it. What constraint or assumption is sitting underneath the stated objective. There’s almost always a conversation that happened two months ago that explains everything about why the brief looks the way it does.
When you understand that, you can start working with the grain of the organisation rather than against it. You’re not challenging the brief. You’re extending it. You’re saying: here’s what we’ve been asked to solve, and here’s the adjacent thing we should probably also be looking at. That’s a different conversation. It’s additive rather than corrective, and it tends to get a very different response.
The second thing I learned is that reframing has to be earned, not asserted. Early in my career I thought the quality of the insight would carry it. If I could just show people a clear enough picture of the real problem, they’d see it. That’s not how organisations work. People don’t change direction because the logic is sound. They change direction because they trust the person presenting it and because the timing is right.
So you build the trust first. You deliver on what was asked. You show that you can work within the constraints without being constrained by them. And then, once you’ve demonstrated that you understand what matters to the business, you bring the reframe. Not as a challenge. As a contribution.
This takes longer than it should. It requires a kind of patience that doesn’t come naturally to designers who care deeply about doing the right work. And it means sometimes shipping something that isn’t as good as it could have been, because the conditions weren’t there yet.
I’ve made peace with that. Mostly.
The thing I keep coming back to is that the brief is a proxy for something deeper. It’s a signal about how an organisation thinks about design and where it sits in the hierarchy of decision-making. A bad brief isn’t just a communication failure. It’s a symptom of a culture that brings design in too late, trusts it too little, or doesn’t quite believe it has anything to say about strategy.
Fixing the brief is a short-term intervention. Changing that culture is the actual work.
It starts not with the kickoff but with every small moment where you choose to show up as a strategic partner rather than a delivery function. The question you ask in the meeting that nobody else asked. The thing you flag in the research that reframes the whole picture. The recommendation you make that goes slightly beyond what was commissioned, because you saw something that mattered.
Briefs get better when design gets trusted. Design gets trusted when designers consistently demonstrate that they’re thinking about more than the task in front of them.
The brief was never the problem. It was always the opening.
