Please stop briefing each other
TL;DR — Internal briefing processes create silos and reduce collaboration. If you take the time you spend on them and use it to build understanding and trust between people then you’ll come up with better solutions to your problems.
The revered ‘agency model’
So many centralised teams (like digital, comms or design) want to adopt an agency model for their working processes. This most obviously manifests itself as the dreaded ‘briefing template’. Some organisations have one, some have many, one charity we work with even has a ‘Master Brief’ (that I can only assume the other briefs have to bow down to on a regular basis.)
You know the drill — a team from within the organisation fills out this hallowed piece of paper / email / form. From here, their request supposedly arrives at their doorstep a few weeks later, gift wrapped and with a nice feedback card.
This process is meant to simplify things. The ‘product’ team feels that it solidifies a service relationship meaning they are more likely to get what they want done. It establishes a power dynamic where they don’t have to bother with any of this ‘collaboration’ malarky and can carry on saving the world all by themselves.
The funny thing is, the centralised team loves this process too! Half of them think that agencies do the best work anyway, so anything they can do to replicate their processes must be a good thing. Who cares if it’s dangerously close to organisational servitude.
In reality the process simply silos these teams from one another. They do not share information effectively or efficiently and work suffers as a result. They end up doing even less than before the briefing process started and everyone is even more exasperated with each other.
Diverse perspectives = better solutions
In every single industry or workplace in the world, the best ideas come from when a variety of different view-points come together.
Collaboration is when there is enough trust between people, to suggest interesting ideas that build on top of each others’ perspectives, rather than trying to dominate people towards a particular way of thinking.
It isn’t the same as compromise where nobody gets what they want. Genuine collaboration means ending up somewhere different to where anyone thought you were going to be when you started.
For these conversations to take place, you need to build understanding, empathy, respect and trust between one another. From here you can create a safe environment which everyone can feel comfortable in contributing to.
A briefing template that enforces rules you don’t understand and haven’t been involved in creating, is the definition of an un-inclusive process. If you’re in the club it’s fine. But anyone who doesn’t have all the context and nuance to the rules is going to find it impossible to achieve what they want.
These templates increase the number of silos, reduce diversity of thinking, inhibit collaboration and ultimately lead to worse solutions to your challenges.
Briefs aren’t the problem, you are
Processes can often look like the root cause of a problem — but they rarely are. It is almost always a people issue. In this instance, it’s a lack of understanding about each other’s goals, concerns and priorities.
This can’t be solved by making a more efficient process. If anything, this will just help you make more of the same mistakes quicker.
The only way to get past this, is to have a concerted effort to build trust with one another. This means actively listening to what other people have to say and exploring what you have in common so you can help one another.
It pays to see this as the skill it is. You’re not going to be great at it the first time you do it. You need to learn through practice, reflection and helping others. Be sure to speak to whoever you’re working with about the process and ask what you could have done better.
From here you you’ve got much more of a chance of creating a respectful partnership, rather than a client / service relationship.
For more on how people actually learn skills check this post out:
No agencies want to work like this
Almost everyone that wants to implement this process, has never worked in an agency.
I run an agency and have previously run centralised teams in large charities.
Every single agency I know wants to have a closer relationship with the people that they work with. This is because our work is more effective when we know more about these individuals. It is also more efficient if we don’t have to start from scratch every time a new project comes in.
Almost all of our best work started as a conversation with someone we already knew, where we could both bring our expertise to the table. We could then work on a variety of solutions trusting that no idea would be seen as a bad one.
If it were up to us, we’d never respond to another brief again.
Discovery processes are important
Almost every time an agency does respond to a brief, they will try to carve out time for some form of ‘Discovery’ process. There is a reason for this.
This time is crucial in building relationships with people. The process itself is just as important as the project outputs that come from it. These are the foundations on which deliverables are built and without them, the solutions will be significantly poorer.
In-house briefing processes rarely take time for this kind of activity despite its importance. The result is again, less understanding which means less trust and poorer ideas.
As a start, you could try our agenda for people based kick off sessions — which at least gets you part of the way there:
If you have to use a brief…
Hopefully this post will have given you all that you need to go out and start putting people before a briefing process. However, if you’re in a central team and want to take some smaller steps, then here’s what I suggest:
- If you do need a template, then fill it out together at the same time. Ideally this is done in person, but it can definitely be done remotely with Skype and a shared document.
- Refine your brief into a single minded proposition together. Once you’ve written the full brief, swap it back and forth until you can summarise it in 100 words or less. This should be a collaborative process with each person swapping between writer and editor.
- Learn as you do it and reflect so everyone gets better next time. Run regular retrospectives on your briefing process so you can hear what’s going well and what’s not.
- Learn how to talk about what’s not on the page. This only comes from better understanding about the individual nuances, relationships and preferences of all the people you work with.
- Focus on outcomes, not outputs. Don’t ever brief somebody on the outputs that you want (eg posters, facebook ads) — talk to them about the outcomes you’re trying to achieve (eg increased support from parents whose children like animals).
- Be clear that this is the beginning of co-creating a solution. Set expectations up front that this isn’t a client-service relationship — both of you are going to be involved throughout.
- Use the most of everybody’s perspectives. To do this, you need to reframe the idea that you are an expert and everyone else isn’t. The truth is that every person has something to add — it’s your job to find out what that is.
- Save on emails! Reducing emails literally saves the world, not to mention your sanity. By creating briefs together at the same time, you’re making David Attenborough happy.
