Most briefs arrive describing a solution. Someone has decided the answer is a rebrand, or an app, or a new site, and the brief is a specification for building it. Sometimes that decision is right. Often it is the first plausible idea that survived a meeting, and the useful work is upstream of it.

We start by talking to the people the organisation serves and the people inside it who deal with the consequences: the front desk, the support queue, the applications engineers, the drivers. Then we read what already exists, because organisations usually know their own problem and have written it down somewhere nobody senior has read. The output is a short document that says what we think is happening, what we would do about it, and what we would not.

This phase is deliberately cheap and deliberately short, and it is the one place we are willing to conclude that a client does not need us. Two or three times a year that is what the document says.