The conversation before the file

Spoken words only - one hook counted, captions and notes excluded, at 130 wpm.

Hook

• The most expensive work in this industry is executed perfectly. Against the wrong question.
• There's a 2,400 year old teaching method that fixes briefs, and I've never seen a studio use it.
• Make it feel premium is where most briefs quietly die.
• I don't ask my team for better ideas. I ask four questions before anyone opens a file.

Body

You've probably sat in a kick-off where someone says make it feel premium, everyone nods, and a few weeks later the work comes back and it hasn't landed at all.

Nobody lied. Everyone just nodded at a word they'd each defined differently.

So I stole something. Socratic questioning.

It's a teaching method, about two and a half thousand years old.

Open questions, asked in a sequence, designed to get someone to arrive at the understanding themselves rather than be handed it.

Built for classrooms. Ended up in therapy rooms.

As far as I can tell, it's never once made it into a design studio.

It breaks into four types of question.

Clarification questions.
What do we actually mean by this?
Premium to who? Compared to what?

Assumption questions.
What are we taking as true?
That the audience wants simple. That the competitor got it right. That the last version failed because of the design.
None of that's been tested, and all of it's holding up the room.

Probing questions.
What's the evidence, and what does it commit us to?
Not I like it. Not it feels right.
What do we know, and what does knowing it mean we have to do next?

And the one everyone skips.
Question the question. Is this the problem worth solving?

It's interesting that none of those are creative questions. There's no taste in them at all.

They're structural, and they all happen before anyone opens a file.

Improving something is always hard when you can't see its first principles. This is how you find them.

Not by having better ideas. By asking better questions.

So have a go on your next brief, before you open anything.

If it survives, build it. If it doesn't, you've just saved yourself a fortnight.

CTA

• Tell me the word on your last brief that everyone nodded at and nobody had defined.
• Which of the four breaks your current brief? Tell me and I'll tell you what I'd ask next.

Post image text

The craft was never the file