The Importance of a Good Briefing for IdeaProduction
Every person involved in generating ideas for clients has had the same frustrating experience over and over again: It is both extremely important to get a good briefing for your task as well as extremely difficult.
Our clients know so much about their products that they often just do not see the forest for the trees. We, as external people, can challenge them to come up with the useful information we need in order to do a good job:
- Get a good description of the current situation they are in, how they arrived there and why they are sure that their picture is correct
- Get a clear description of the goal they would like to achieve in general and what the idea generating process should do for that goal (is the ideageneration process trying to reach the goal or is it rather one puzzle piece on the long way to reach it? Both answers are OK, but we need to know!)
- What are the criteria against which the ideas will be measured later (eg. implementable next year, low cost, customer focus etc.)
Only, and only if you get at least this, you can be really sure to do a good job in coming up with ideas, no matter what process you use.
It becomes even more difficult when clients have to learn to do these three steps for themselves. They in general assume that everyone in the organisation already knows all this, and thus, why even bother to discuss it? But when you have to come up with ideas internally, you have to go through exactly the same briefing process as when working with external help, whether Ideafactories, agencies or consultancies.
Trust me.
