Briefing: why you need it and how it works

At its heart, strategy is about people. The strategist deploys people to achieve certain enterprise outcomes. There are two broad groups of people. External people will be the market, resource owners and stakeholders. Internal people will be people at various level of the hierarchy who transform resources or provide services for the external market.

External and internal groups need to be directed to achieve specified goals. This could take the form of an advertisement for the market, a memo to staff or communication to a stakeholder, for instance. In other words, the directive is a function of communication. Communication becomes a granular unit of strategy, or a tactic.

If your communication is not up to scratch, strategy will fail. To make strategy work, all communication agencies must be party to briefing, the process by which directives are developed, issued, managed and tracked.

The brief can have many forms and elaborations, but its core is always the same: who are we speaking to, what are we saying and what do we expect them to do? If you always bear in mind these three questions, your communication will be far more effective.

Who are we speaking to? This question describes the recipient of the directive. It requires empathy for the recipient, understanding of their nature, and the role of the recipient in the outcome. If the recipient is wrong or misunderstood, the communication is likely to fail.

What are we saying? This asks for understanding of the strategy and its translation into activity. The action must be suggested, though preferably specified as clearly as possible, broken down into steps and show the reward to the person for following the directive.

What do we expect them to do? This confirms the desired outcome of the tactic, which in turn loops back to confirmation of the two questions.

At the beginning of the process, the answers to the questions should be visualized by the person issuing the instructions, then written down descriptively in as much detail as possible, then further customized for the recipient of the message.

This may seem incredibly simple and self-evident, yet it is not common practice. Its absence will be found at the heart of most failed communication campaigns, misunderstandings with stakeholders or poorly executed internal instructions.

The problem almost certainly lies with managerial discipline. Most managers will want to get through the job as quickly as possible, but in the rush, they will fail the quality test which the three questions can address. That affects both managerial KPIs and organizational KPAs.

Yet the effort to answer the three questions becomes easier as time goes by. Markets, stakeholders and resource owners are fairly static in most organizations. So too are employees. Once the effort of defining the recipients of communication is complete, the job should rarely be completed. Strategy and its tactics should be understood during the strategic planning phase. If the first two questions are understood, the third question becomes routine confirmation.

‘High level’ as a goal without an explicit briefing is a sign of laziness or lack of comprehension on the part of the manager, unless contextualized by the manager.

If your instruction doesn’t include the three answers, repeat the process until you are certain that it is correct.