Prompting Is New. Briefing Isn’t.

Imagine briefing Michelangelo for the Sistine Chapel.

At one extreme, you could say: Please paint the ceiling. Plenty of freedom, not much help. At the other, you could specify the colours, scenes, figures and positions, perhaps ask for three sketches by Thursday. Plenty of instruction, not much Michelangelo.

Many years ago I came across a presentation built around exactly that thought. Damian O’Malley imagined what the brief for Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling might have looked like, and Steven Stark turned the idea into a slide deck.

The cleverness was in what happened between those two extremes. A good brief could be clear about the ambition and meaning of the work while leaving the artist enough room to do something the commissioner could not have designed himself.

I have thought about that presentation surprisingly often over the years, partly because marketing has spent roughly the same period complaining about briefs.

Agency people complained that clients could not write them. Clients complained that agencies did not follow them. Creatives complained they were either vague enough to mean anything or detailed enough to make creativity unnecessary. And almost everyone has at some point received some version of: Make it innovative, but on brand. Be bold, but don’t frighten anyone. We want something disruptive. By Friday.

The remarkable thing is not that so many briefs were bad. The remarkable thing is how much good work still came out of them.

There was a reason for that: for years, great debriefing compensated for bad briefing.

A good strategist, creative, consultant or agency team rarely treated the written brief as holy scripture. They asked questions. They listened for the thing the client kept circling around without quite saying. They knew the organisation, the politics, the category and sometimes the client well enough to recognise that “we need a campaign” actually meant “we have no compelling reason for anyone to care about this product yet.”

They read between the lines. Occasionally they read between lines that weren’t even there.

In other words, capable humans became remarkably good at rescuing those who gave them mediocre instructions.

And then along came AI.

One of the more educational features of working with generative AI is its slightly irritating tendency to expose what you actually asked for rather than what you vaguely remember meaning. Ask a generic question and there is a decent chance you will receive a generic answer. Forget important context and the machine will not necessarily infer the particular piece of context that seemed blindingly obvious inside your own head. Give five conflicting ambitions and it may cheerfully attempt all five.

Then we look at the result and declare: AI is producing rubbish.

Sometimes it is. But sometimes a disappointing AI answer is less a failure of the model than an X-ray of the brief.

“Sometimes a disappointing AI answer is less a failure of the model than an X-ray of the brief.”

That is one reason I am increasingly sceptical about treating “prompt engineering” as an exotic new discipline built around secret incantations. Of course there are techniques worth learning, and the technology has its peculiarities. But much of what makes an AI instruction better is remarkably familiar.

What are we actually trying to achieve? For whom? In what context? What is already known? What matters most? What constraints are real? What should not happen? What does good look like? And where do I want the recipient to follow my instructions versus use judgement of its own?

Prompting may be new. Briefing isn’t.

Perhaps the most important part is the last one, because a good brief is not an instruction manual.

If I already know precisely what the answer should be, I don’t need much intelligence on the receiving end. I need execution. The reason we brief talented humans, and increasingly capable machines, is precisely because we expect something from them that we did not completely specify in advance.

That creates the tension at the heart of good briefing.

Too little direction and we create drift. Too much and we create obedience.

Freedom without direction creates drift. Direction without freedom creates obedience. Good briefing creates room for judgement.

“Freedom without direction creates drift. Direction without freedom creates obedience. Good briefing creates room for judgement.”

Somewhere while getting better at giving instructions to AI, I realised that this was no longer just a marketing lesson. Briefing and managing share a surprisingly difficult task: defining intent and boundaries without defining the answer.

Good managers do not simply throw an objective over the wall and call that empowerment. Nor do they specify every move and then wonder why nobody shows initiative. They establish what matters, what is fixed, where the risks lie, what success means and where another person is expected to think.

In other words: clear intent, scoped instructions and defined freedom.

The point is not that managing humans is the same as prompting machines. It very obviously isn’t. Humans bring relationships, emotions, tacit knowledge, ambitions, insecurities, institutional memory, dissent and the occasional desire to spend the afternoon doing something entirely different. Long may they continue to do so.

Good people have always been remarkably good at protecting managers from their own bad instructions. AI is less discreet.

That may turn out to be useful. AI gives us something close to a high-speed practice environment for delegation. You give direction. You see the result seconds later. You notice what was missing. You clarify the objective. You remove an unnecessary constraint. You explain what you meant by “more strategic,” because apparently that phrase was not quite the masterclass in precision you had imagined. Then you try again.

A feedback loop that might take days in an organisation can happen repeatedly in minutes.

We thought AI would mainly accelerate production. It may also be accelerating our education in giving direction.

“We thought AI would mainly accelerate production. It may also be accelerating our education in giving direction.”

And that lesson is likely to outlast today’s prompt techniques. Models will change. Interfaces will change. Many clever prompting tricks will disappear into the products themselves.

Being able to formulate intent, establish context, make choices, articulate constraints and leave useful room for judgement will not.

If anything, that becomes more important as the intelligence available to us increases. The better the person on the receiving end of a brief, the less sense it makes to prescribe everything they should do. As AI becomes more capable, the same principle starts to apply there too.

Capability raises the potential value of freedom, but only when freedom has meaningful direction.

Which takes me back to Michelangelo.

The point of that old Sistine Chapel briefing story was never that the commissioner should simply have said: You’re Michelangelo. Surprise me. That would not have been a great brief either.

The magic lies somewhere between control and abdication: enough clarity about purpose to point the work somewhere meaningful, enough boundaries to make the problem real, and enough freedom for somebody else’s intelligence to contribute something you could not have specified yourself.

For decades we relied on good people to repair bad briefs downstream. AI is pushing more of that responsibility back upstream, towards the person giving the instruction. That feels like progress.

And it suggests a simple test before you brief a colleague, agency or AI.

Can you answer four questions clearly: What are we trying to achieve, and for whom? What is fixed, and what is genuinely open? What does good look like? And where do I want execution versus judgement?

If you cannot answer those, another clever prompt probably will not save you.

If you can, resist the temptation to specify the rest.

The better the intelligence on the receiving end, the less useful it is to specify the answer. Our job is to specify the intent.