Why difficult questions matter

The brief that arrives on your desk is rarely the whole problem. Fourteen years in, we've learned that the most valuable thing we can do, before anything else, is ask the question nobody wanted to ask.

Early on, we tried to answer the brief we were given. Now we start by questioning it. Not to be difficult, to be useful. Because in almost every project we've worked on, the real problem was sitting slightly to the left of the stated one.

A rebrand that was actually about internal culture. A campaign that was actually about a product that didn't work. A website that was actually about a business that didn't know what it was yet. The question nobody wants to ask is usually the one that unlocks everything.