Design

Six People, One Brief, Six Different Angles

Six People, One Brief, Six Different Angles

This week's internal workshop had six of us pulling apart the same client brief, six different ways. It's one of the brain exercises we run every so often to keep sharpening how we think as a team of creatives and storytellers, less about the destination, more about staying limber in how we get there. The process itself is simple, and by now it's basically muscle memory. Understand the pain. Map the landscape. Decide the action. Figure out what's next. Everyone in the room runs through the same four steps, in the same order, working off the exact same brief. What's never the same is the creative angle everyone comes back with. Same steps, six different storytelling angles Six people. One brief. Six completely different ways of telling the same story, and not because anyone skipped a step or misread the assignment. If anything, everyone followed the process correctly. The process was never designed to make six people think alike. It's designed to make sure nothing important slips through the cracks along the way, that the pain gets understood before an approach gets shaped, that the landscape gets mapped before an action gets chosen. The destination doesn't move, it stays tied to the client's actual problem and desired outcome. What the process doesn't touch, and was never meant to touch, is how someone chooses to get the client there once those boxes are checked. That part comes from somewhere else entirely.

Where the actual difference comes from

Sit six people down with the same information and ask them to shape an approach to the same problem, and you start to see how much of that approach is quietly shaped by everything that has nothing to do with the brief. Someone's angle leaned on a business podcast they'd caught the week before. Another pulled from a limited series they hadn't been able to stop watching. Someone's take came straight from years of sitting across the table from actual clients, hearing the same objection enough times to recognize it instantly. Someone else just has a genuinely odd sense of humor, and somehow that's exactly what made their version of the copy land. Business leaders. Movies. Memes. A questionable joke or two. Bits of parenting logic that have nothing to do with marketing on paper and everything to do with it once you're actually in the room trying to persuade someone. All of it quietly folds into how a person reads a brief and what angle they decide is worth taking.

Why we don't try to standardize this away

It would be easy to look at six different angles from one process and treat it as an inconsistency to fix. We've landed somewhere else. We didn't set out to make six people sound the same, and we're not trying to now. The process exists to catch what shouldn't be missed and keep everyone aimed at the same outcome. Everything layered on top of that, the taste, the references, the slightly strange angle someone brings because of what they've been consuming outside of work, that's not noise getting in the way of good work. That's most of what makes one approach actually different from another, in a field where it's easy for everything to start sounding identical. Which makes us curious about the people reading this too: which aspect of your personal or business life do you notice adding salt and pepper to the content you create, or the personality you're building?