Don’t let a crisis define the brief
In spite of what you’ll be told, a lot, don’t let a crisis define how you act in the future. This crisis isn’t an opportunity any greater than the ones you’ve had already.
In the world of advertising or design, the ‘brief’ is amongst the most critical success factors in the project, and it isn’t even written by the firm that will do the work. The client will write a brief to describe the problem they’re trying to fix, and the mission for any firm responding to the brief is to come up with ideas to fix it.
The good firms don’t just come up with ideas: first, they change the brief. They rebrief. David Abbott, the greatest copywriter of his generation, does it with such authoritative style in the following rare insight to the pitching and rebriefing process.
His future client, British Telecom, needed to get people, particularly men, to speak more on the phone. It’s really quite rare for anyone to see a pitch that responds to a brief — pitches are done behind closed doors, and firms jealously guard their creative content in case it gets nicked by another agency. To Abbott’s dismay, but to all of our advantage, British Telecom’s leadership team didn’t all show up, and so a VHS recording was made right after the Boardroom pitch. And years later, we all get a thirty-minute masterclass insight into why it’s good to talk. In this pitch, he picks apart everything that’s wrong with the current approach to that challenge, and the brief itself. Set aside 30 minutes now. Watch it. Watch the first ten minutes. Learn. And then come back:
It’s great, isn’t it? He manages to rewrite the brief, show why it was wrong in the first place, and how his team could do so much better if BT were able to open their minds up a bit. And he does it all while making BT probably feel rather clever for, in the end, hiring them (plot spoiler: the did win the pitch, and went on to create one of the most memorable advertising series of all time).
My own team rarely respond to a general brief that’s put out to tender. We’re part of an increasing number of agencies who choose not to. We have enough people who seek us out because they know the value we bring in changing their brief, before coming up with great work. And when we do respond to a brief, we nearly always change it.
We’re known as a problem-finding agency in the world of learning (we coined the term when we founded back in 2009, before it was fashionable). So we start any project by rigorously testing the assumptions behind the brief. That problem-finding process is a systemic guarantee that the brief will change. We take our time — as much as 50% of a project will involve changing the original brief, and ending up somewhere quite different — and nearly always better — from where we thought we would a year or two previously. With the right problem, the right ideas will flood.
If briefs designed by humans are flawed, the briefs presented by nature are no different.
The world presents us with its own briefs all the time: I started NoTosh at the height of the 2008–9 financial crisis — an accidental human-created brief. Today, we’re all being presented with another crisis, and a brief that has been co-designed between nature and humankind. Because nature’s involved in this one, it’s tempting to have a rather fatalistic attitude: “there’s no way we can change the brief.”
There are plenty of people whose job is not to do anything but respond to this natural crisis: they work in the world of urgency, and without them we’d be lost at sea. Most of us do not have to join them in this world of urgency — when we do we run out of toilet paper and tinned tomatoes. People tend to get sucked into the undertow of something quite so significant, and don’t have the knowledge, skills, money or discipline to power out of it.
Running headlong into massive changes in your life, your organisation or in your business, on the back of this urgent, dodgy brief isn’t wise. Imagine the crisis has written a brief, with unreasonably urgent deadlines, questionable rationale and no understanding of whether we have the skills to pull off the changes it’s asking us for. You wouldn’t respond unquestioning to a brief this poor, let alone commit to “systemic changes” that will last a life-time on the back of it.
So rewrite the brief.
This health crisis is propelling many things, with great urgency, into your field of vision; none of it is new:
- the school timetable has been getting in the way of quality learning for decades;
- the morning commute has been driving people to despair for fifty years or more;
- the lack of genuine human interaction in cities is well known to contribute to alcoholism, drug abuse and depression;
- global travel fuels a culture of meetings, where greater financial value is placed on people traveling thousands of miles, while killing our planet, when the same thing done over a video conference achieves the same impact, but is expected to cost 50–80% less.
All of these questions are ones that you could have been tackling four months or four years ago. So don’t get distracted by the urgency the crisis is throwing in your way today. Set up a team or task force to deal with the urgent stuff. Leave urgency and unpredictability to them.
In the meantime, you and everyone else do what you should’ve done ages ago.
The best time to plan was years ago. The second-best time is now.
Strategy is an everyday activity in the best organisations. It should be a verb, used to shape every action you plan and undertake. And all strategy starts with research. Do your research into what works, and doesn’t work, before the crisis came along and during it, right now. Pin it all up in a Project Nest. Involve everyone. Don’t let them all get sucked into urgent, either: define who’s working on urgent, and the rest need to get engaged on the longer-term plan you should’ve made before this came along.
Then ask what assumptions are hiding in all those things that work well — are they working well today, in the light of this crisis? Why not? Ask “why not?” five times. What’s the problem your old ideas were designed to solve? What’s the opportunity they were trying to create? When you can see the answers to all these questions in one place, you can then start to synthesise them, and work out the real problem you’re there to solve, and forget the rest. Gain focus. Cut the distractions. And power up the ideas that are most likely to solve the problem you had all along.
Gillian Fergusson, Depute Rector at Glasgow’s Hutchesons’ Grammar School, set her Pastoral Care Project Nest up after a strategy incubator we ran over the winter:
[It’s] still a work in progress but I have gained so much from it. We’ve asked these questions around the room:
What works well in our pastoral care system?
What might we improve our pastoral care system?
How might we enable pastoral staff to know the pupils who never ask for help?
What does it feel like when you are really well known by pastoral staff?
How can we further improve relationships between pastoral staff and pupils?
Which system (horizontal or vertical) would you prefer and why?
We had two weeks of pupil input and are in the middle of staff input, with parents and governors next week. I’ll keep you posted — lessons learnt and already an epiphany or two.
This isn’t a crisis of opportunity: old habits die hard
It’s trite to say that a crisis killing tens of thousands is an opportunity to create change in a system or in an organisation, or that such a series of unfortunate events will “almost certainly” change anything. Nature’s dominion has, this time, broken man’s social union, but like Burns’ wee tim’rous beastie the present only touches us. Today’s crisis will not likely create any change at all in our previous habits, and history backs up this view: we seem destined to repeat the mistakes others made in the past.
Unless we do the work now to plan the kind of change we want to see.
The fact is, we could have planned the change we want to see at any point. It’s just that, soon, we will all have more time on our hands to think deeply about what we actually want.
So I make a plea: don’t let the “brief” that this crises has given you determine your next steps. Re-write the brief, and give a clear indication of why the crisis’ brief was a red herring all along.
