When the work comes back wrong, the instinct is to critique the output. More often the output was a faithful answer to a poorly framed question. Fix the question and the work fixes itself.
Most rework is a framing problem
A team asked to "make it pop" will deliver something, and it will be wrong, because the brief never said what decision the work was meant to support. The failure happened at the framing, not the execution.
Before critiquing a draft, check what it was actually asked to do. The gap is usually there.
A good question names the decision
The best briefs replace adjectives with a decision: what should this help someone do, or choose, or understand? Answer that and the criteria for good work become obvious to everyone.
Improving the question is the cheapest, highest-leverage edit available — and it happens before anyone has spent a day building the wrong thing.
