The Decision Before the Design

Design is a response to a brief. If the brief is wrong, elegant design simply executes the wrong decision more beautifully. The instinct in most organisations is to move quickly from "we need a project" to "let's brief an architect" — skipping the harder, less visible work of testing whether the project itself is the right answer.

Three Questions Before the First Drawing

Before a single drawing is commissioned, three questions deserve independent answers:

• Does the proposed project actually solve the business problem it's meant to solve?
• Is the assumed budget realistic against current market costs, not last year's?
• Has the organisation seriously tested the alternative of not building at all?

Design is a response to a brief. If the brief is wrong, elegant design simply executes the wrong decision more beautifully.

The Cost of Skipping This Step

Skipping this step doesn't save time. It moves the cost of getting it wrong from a conversation — cheap, fast, reversible — to a construction budget: expensive, slow, and effectively irreversible once ground has broken. The organisations that test the brief before commissioning design aren't slower to build. They're less likely to build the wrong thing well.