We just jumped in. Nobody asked whether we should.
The problem is taken as given
The team treats the brief as settled and starts executing. If the brief defines the wrong problem or rests on a bad assumption, that mistake gets carried through everything that follows.
- Work begins the day the brief lands, with no step for questioning it.
- Rework traces back to a starting assumption nobody tested.
- Questioning the brief feels like questioning the person who wrote it.
Who: the person who wrote the brief and two people who worked on it. Ask: "What did we assume when we started, and which of those turned out to be wrong?" Count: of the last five pieces of rework, how many trace back to the starting assumption. You're probably looking at this pattern if most rework traces to the premise and there was no point where anyone could have questioned it. Probably not if the premise held and the rework came from later changes. If not, compare it with Context stripped in the handoff.
The familiar answer wins. In that pattern, the problem does get questioned, but it gets answered the same way every time.
Ask the group, "What else could this problem be?" Do not move on until there are three different answers on the board.
In a study of 356 decisions in medium and large organizations, about two-thirds considered only one option, and decisions that started from one person's preferred idea were fully used less often than decisions that started by agreeing on the goal (Nutt, 1999). Emerging: one large field study that shows an association, not a cause.