Last week, we shared the Living Project Brief. This week, Sophie Lawson, SGWX Member, explores how conversations beyond the brief shed light on what an assignment actually needed to accomplish.

Focus on the Why and Let the Project Revolve Around It.

In a simple world, working on a project would be like putting together a puzzle with the picture right on the box. Everyone knows exactly what you're building before anyone places a single piece.

But that's not the world we live in. The puzzle of life doesn’t come with a neat picture on the box. We have to figure it out ourselves. 

In my line of work, when a client comes to me with a brief, that’s the blueprint for the picture they want to piece together. 

Recently, I was brought in as an editor and strategist on an internal campaign for a company with 30,000 employees across dozens of countries. The project brief was detailed. But at that size, decisions move at a glacial pace, and by the time it cleared internal approval, the situation had changed. The idea no longer fit, and the picture no longer matched the puzzle. 

20 years of working with various clients has taught me what they want and what they need aren’t the same thing. They’re not clueless, they’re human. We are infinitely complex, and throwing these complex pieces into a company doesn’t smooth out those complexities, it compounds them. There are multiple stakeholders with different priorities and thought processes, trying to solve problems in a world that won't hold still. Even if a client could nail down the picture today, there's no guarantee it stays true by the time the work is done.

That's because it’s incredibly hard to picture what hasn't been built yet. In Back to the Future Part II, they imagined 2015 with fax machines in every room, because fax machines were the height of technology in 1989. Ask someone what they want, and you’ll end up building tomorrow entirely out of what things look like today. Ask someone why they want it, and the options are limitless. 

Going back through my client’s brief, I had to piece a new picture together. I found it full of “what”: what to deliver, what tools to use, what process to follow. The one thing that should have really guided the project, the “why,” was barely there. That gap told me where to start looking. I dug through the email threads and Slack messages. I held 15-minute micro-brainstorms with stakeholders who'd been cc'd on everything and rarely consulted. Somewhere in there was the missing piece: the actual reason this campaign needed to exist, right now, for this company and everyone in it. Once I had it, I shaped the idea into something that still honored what my point of contact had originally fallen in love with, while fitting the world as it now stood. The client loved it. So did their employees.

A client's ask is rarely the full assignment. You need to find the missing pieces.

The “how” and the “what” are tools and deliverables that are going to evolve as the picture gets clearer. The “why” is the human aspect, the part that shapes the picture and guides the project. 

The brief is a starting point, not a finished picture. It holds what we know right now, and it changes as the world does. My job is to understand the human side of it, to figure out why it needs to exist, to find the gaps, and to keep bringing the picture into focus as we go. Stick to the brief too tightly, and you'll get a stale puzzle that was built for a different world (and possibly a fax machine in your bathroom). Guide it with a purpose, and you end up with something no one could have described at the start.

Before committing to a deliverable, investigate the problem it’s supposed to solve. The Five Whys uses each answer as the starting point for the next question.

These aren’t five questions to ask every client, and you might need fewer -- or more -- than five. Stop when another “why” no longer changes what you’d recommend doing next.

Take this request: “We need a video to get more employees to use the portal.”

Check each explanation with the people closest to the problem. You might discover that clear ownership and a content cleanup are better places to start than investing time and money in a video.