Summarise a Complex Brief Before You Start Working on It

The most expensive mistake on any project is misunderstanding the brief. By the time you deliver the wrong thing, you have lost the time and often the relationship. Reading a brief back before starting, identifying the gaps, and surfacing the ambiguities is the cheapest insurance in any professional context. This does it for you.

I have received a brief for a piece of work and before I start, I want to make sure I have understood it correctly.

The brief: [paste or describe the brief you received]

Summarise the brief back to me: what the deliverable is, what the brief is explicitly asking for, what it seems to assume without stating, who the audience is and what they already know, what success looks like based on the brief, and any ambiguities or gaps that I should clarify with the person who issued the brief before I start. List the clarifying questions I should ask in order of importance.