The brief that arrives before you need it
There is a question you ask every week. Not in the same words — you ask it of whoever you catch, in a corridor or in the first minute of a call, and the answer depends on who that was and what sort of morning they were having. You have been asking it for a year, you have never had a complete answer to it, and it has never once occurred to you to stop.
That is what a standing brief is for. Ask Ona is what you use when you want an answer now. A Routine is for the question you already know you will want the answer to every week, so you stop asking it and it starts arriving instead.
A brief has a reader, a moment and a decision
Almost every brief that ends up unread was designed without one of those three, and it is usually possible to say which one from the brief itself.
A brief has one reader. Written for a named person, it can assume what they already know, skip the background, and open at the part they do not have. Written for everybody, it has to explain itself, and what you get back is a status report — a document that is read by nobody in particular because it was addressed to nobody in particular.
A brief has a moment. It is attached to something in the week: a call, a decision point, the hour when you choose what to spend Friday on. A brief with no moment is a piece of general awareness, and general awareness is the thing your week has least room for.
And a brief changes a decision. This is the test to apply before setting anything up, because it is easy to design one that is genuinely interesting and changes nothing at all. If you cannot name the decision it affects, what you have built is a newsletter, and you will read it enthusiastically for three weeks and then stop.
Arrival time is most of the design
The same brief at two different times is two different products. Delivered after the thing it describes, it is a record, and records are read when something has gone wrong. Delivered before, it is preparation, and preparation is the only form of information that changes an outcome.
So set the arrival against the moment it serves, and then move it earlier than feels necessary. A brief that lands while you are walking into the meeting is a brief you will read during the meeting, which is worse than not having read it. The evening before is not a refinement; it is the difference between reading something and skimming it on the stairs.
One arrival time is worth stating on its own. Anything whose job is to catch something you have dropped should arrive while there is still time to pick it up. A list of your own unmet commitments landing at five on Friday is a weekend of low-grade guilt. The same list on Thursday morning is an afternoon of phone calls.
Designing one brief
- Name the one readerUsually you. If it is somebody else, write it as though you were handing it to them personally, because a brief that has been generalised to survive a wider audience has already lost the specificity that made it worth sending.
- Name the moment it servesThe Tuesday call, the monthly pricing decision, the hour you plan the week. If no moment presents itself, that is the answer: you have found something you are curious about, not something you need.
- Ask one narrow questionNot "how is the Halden account". What has been said about the renewal since the last call, and what is still waiting on us. A wide question produces a brief that covers a subject; a narrow one produces a brief that answers something.
- Set it to arrive early enough to act onWork backwards from the moment, not forwards from when the information exists. The natural instinct is to schedule a brief for when the week's meetings are finished, which is reliably too late to be useful.
- Put a review date in your own calendarA month out. If you cannot name one thing you did differently because of it, cancel it. Nobody reviews their briefs, which is exactly how people end up with eleven of them and read none.
Three shapes cover most of what a leadership week actually needs. They are worth stating concretely, because the abstract version of this advice produces the newsletter every time.
| What it covers | When it arrives | The decision it changes |
|---|---|---|
| Everything said about the Halden account since the last call | The evening before the standing call | What you open with, and what you deliberately do not raise |
| The commitments you personally made this week, with their dates | Thursday morning | Which one you clear before the week ends |
| Anything said anywhere about the quarter's single priority | The last working day of the month | Whether that priority is still the priority |
The first is the one most people build first, and it earns its place inside a fortnight. A standing external call — a supplier, a partner, an agency — has a particular failure mode: the other side always knows precisely what was agreed last time, because for them it is the account, and you are working from the last twenty minutes of the previous conversation, because for you it is Tuesday.
The second is the least comfortable and the most valuable. A brief covering what you said you would do, built from the conversations you actually had instead of from the tasks you remembered to write down, is a precise account of the difference between those two lists. It lands somewhere between useful and mortifying, and it is the brief people are most likely to keep.
The third is the slowest and the one worth protecting. Every organisation has a stated priority for the quarter, and the interesting question is never what was said about it in the meeting where it was set. It is what has been said about it since, in the fifty conversations that were nominally about something else. A month of those, read on one page, is the clearest available answer to whether the priority survived contact with the work.
We run three of them now. The one that arrives the night before the Tuesday partner call has changed how those calls go, because I walk in knowing what we said we would do and whether we did it. The other eleven I set up in the first month are gone.
Ines K., Managing Director, engineering consultancy
Three, not thirty
The characteristic failure of automation is not that the output is poor. It is proliferation. Setting up a brief takes two minutes, and that is precisely the problem: nothing about the cost of creating one tells you anything about the cost of receiving it every week until you cancel it.
Attention is the fixed quantity here, and it does not expand to meet the number of documents arriving in it. Six briefs do not give you six times the preparation. They give you the same hour of reading, spread thinner, and a growing sense that you are on top of things that is not supported by anything you could name.
The cull is easier with a rule than with a judgement, because on any given Monday every brief can be defended. Cancel one when any of these is true:
- You cannot name a thing you did differently because of it.
- You read it after the moment it was built for, more weeks than not.
- It has arrived with the same three items in it for a month.
- The question it answers is one you would no longer bother to ask.
So cull them, monthly, with no ceremony about it. Keep the ones you have visibly acted on and cancel everything else; a brief costs nothing to rebuild if you turn out to have been wrong. Three is a good number for most people and it is remarkable how hard it is to stay at three. A week made mostly of other people's meetings has other pressure points too, and Ona for business leaders sets out where they are.
What a standing brief cannot notice
Silence in a brief is ambiguous, and this is the one genuine risk of running any of them. A brief with nothing in it can mean nothing happened, or it can mean nothing was recorded, and the page reads identically either way. Standing automation produces a feeling of coverage, and the feeling arrives whether or not the coverage does. Anything you are relying on a brief to surface has to be something you know is being captured in the first place.
A Routine also cannot want anything. It reports on the thread you pointed it at, faithfully, long after that thread has stopped being the one that matters, and it will never tell you that it has become irrelevant. Briefs calcify. The judgement about what deserves a standing question is yours, it needs revisiting every few months, and nothing will prompt you to do it.
Nor does reading do anything. A brief tells you the supplier has still not confirmed the date; it does not ring the supplier. Everything that makes earlier information valuable happens after the reading, and a leader who reads five briefs a week and changes nothing has simply found a better-informed way to have the same week they were always going to have.
And a brief reaches exactly as far as you do. It is built from what you have recorded and from anything in a workspace you belong to, which means it is not a way to find out what happened in meetings you were not part of. That is the correct boundary and we would rather state it plainly than let anyone discover it by finding a gap in something they had started to trust.
Once they are running
Usually not. A brief written for one reader and forwarded to nine becomes a status report on its way, and the things that made it worth reading — the assumed context, the absence of explanation — are the first things to go.
If the team needs the same information, write them their own, with their own question in it. Two short briefs beat one that is trying to serve two audiences.
Narrow the question rather than asking for something shorter. Length is almost always a symptom of a brief being asked to cover a subject instead of answer a question.
"What is happening with the platform migration" grows every week. "What decisions about the migration changed this week, and what is waiting on me" does not.
They keep arriving, and coming back to nine unread briefs is genuinely worse than coming back to none, because the temptation is to skim all of them and conclude you are caught up.
Pause them while you are out and read one brief covering the whole period when you return. A fortnight compressed into a page is a different and much more useful document from a fortnight of pages.
Schedule one brief
Pick the meeting you are least prepared for, set a Routine to arrive the evening before it, and cancel it in a month if it has not changed anything you did.