Work tends to start before anyone agrees it has started.
Often before design is involved, direction has already begun to form. A date is on the calendar. A problem has been named loosely. A few constraints are treated as fixed without much discussion. None of this is written down as “the brief,” but it functions like one.
Design usually inherits it.
That’s where a lot of friction comes from. Not because the brief is missing, but because it’s partial and distributed. Some of it lives in a doc. Some of it lives in Jira. Some of it lives in what product is trying to protect or what engineering is worried about. The work moves forward anyway.
Early on, this doesn’t feel like an issue. The first rounds are productive. Everyone agrees in principle. It’s only when decisions start stacking up that things get strange. Feedback pulls in different directions. Work gets reframed late. Decisions stay open longer than they should.
At that point, rewriting the brief rarely helps. You can make it clearer on paper and still be misaligned in practice. What matters more is noticing what’s already shaping the outcome. What’s treated as non-negotiable. Which questions get answered quickly. Which ones never really do.
Once you accept that most briefs are inherited rather than authored, the job shifts.
Most of the time, that means keeping it close as the work unfolds. Watching how priorities change once execution starts. Paying attention to which constraints keep reasserting themselves, even when no one is naming them directly.
By the time decisions start piling up, that orientation matters more than whatever was written down at the beginning. ☺
To be continued in…
Field Note — Judgment ²
