Before the day · Page 20
Define the challenge
For you only
This is the most important chapter in the book. The brief I wrote for Ionian Technologies in Thessaloniki was 31 words long. On a build day, eight people build for six hours against whatever sentence you hand them at 9:15. That is 48 working hours, more than a week of one person's time, steered by 31 words. No other sentence you write this year will have that exchange rate.
One word on words. I say "challenge" for the problem you pick and "brief" for the sentence you write about it, and I use both, because on the day they are the same thing: the sentence on the wall.
Charles Kettering, who ran research at General Motors for almost thirty years, is credited with the line "a problem well stated is a problem half solved." On a build day that line is the actual deal. You state the problem well the week before. The room solves the other half before five o'clock.
The brief works three jobs across the day, and when it fails one of them, you find out hours later, when it is expensive.
First, it aims the build. From 9:30 to 15:30 the teams are heads down, and every time one of them gets stuck, your move is the same: point them back at the brief. That only works if the brief points somewhere.
Second, it recruits your testers. The brief is a casting call. Write "a returning 25-year-old Zara shopper" and you know who to go find five of. Write "users" and you will end up testing with whoever was near the kitchen.
Third, it is the first line of the scoring rubric. The judges score "served the brief": did the team build for the user and goal we set? If the brief never named a user or a goal, that criterion scores nothing, the pitches cannot be compared, and the judges fall back on judging polish. Which is exactly what the whole day is designed to avoid.
So the sentence you write the week before is the build instructions, the casting call, and the judging criteria, all at once. That is why it gets its own chapter.