A competition brief arrives and the deadline is tight. The team gets together, ideas start flowing, and by Monday someone is already sketching.

It’s a familiar scene. And by then, the first mistake has usually been made.

As CEO, partner and creative head of Pitch, the museum design bureau I helped grow to more than 60 people, I watched this happen many times. Now, working independently with architecture practices and exhibition design studios on competitions, I see the same pattern: teams start solving before they understand the problem.

The result is rarely a bad design. More often it is a beautiful concept that answers the wrong question, overshoots the real budget, or fails to convince the people who decide.

So before concept development starts, I work through five questions, always in the same order.

1. What problem are we really solving?

The brief tells you what the client wants. It seldom explains why.

A museum competition might ask for an immersive visitor experience, while the underlying challenge is falling attendance, a blurred institutional identity or a younger audience that no longer comes. These are different problems, and they call for different design responses.

Before discussing creative directions, agree on what success looks like for the client, the institution and its visitors. Then write the ambition down in one sentence. If the team cannot agree on that sentence, it is not ready to sketch. A list of rooms is not a problem statement.

2. What is fixed, and what can we challenge?

Some requirements in a brief are contractual or technical. Others are assumptions, preferences, or solutions someone proposed before the real design work began.

Telling them apart is where the room for a better idea comes from.

Can the visitor route be reorganised? Can a requested technology be replaced with something that tells the story better? Can the exhibition narrative question the proposed spatial arrangement?

Go through the programme, the collection and the site, and mark each requirement as fixed or open. The strongest entries know which constraints matter and where a better solution is possible. Challenge only what you can defend. A departure from the brief needs a clear rationale on the boards, or the jury will assume the team simply missed the requirement.

3. What is the jury judging?

Competition teams focus on producing an impressive concept. Impressive to whom, and by which criteria?

A jury might prioritise architectural originality, visitor engagement, feasibility, sustainability or alignment with the institution’s mission. Sometimes the criteria are weighted in the documents. Sometimes they have to be read between the lines of the brief and the client’s wider objectives.

If the criteria or their weights are missing, ask in the clarification round. That is what it is for, and few teams use it well. Then make the concept’s strengths legible against those criteria. A strong idea that the jury cannot map onto its own scoring sheet starts at a disadvantage, however compelling it is.

4. What does the budget cover?

Budget conversations tend to happen too late, after the team has fallen in love with an ambitious direction.

In museum and exhibition projects, the line between construction, exhibition fit-out, multimedia production, content development, hardware, software and operation makes an enormous difference. A budget that looks generous can turn tight once you learn what it has to pay for. So establish the financial boundaries early, and point the creativity at what can be delivered.

If the brief does not say what the budget covers, ask in the clarification round. If there is no answer, write your assumption on the boards. A jury trusts a team that priced the real project.

5. Who makes the final decision?

The people who write the brief, evaluate the entries, approve the budget and eventually run the museum are often different people. Their interests overlap, but their priorities differ. A director thinks about mission and reputation. A developer thinks about cost and schedule. Curators guard the integrity of the content. The jury is looking for an exceptional creative proposition.

Find out whether the jury appoints the winner, or whether a board, operator or sponsor must approve the result. That map shows conflicts before they become problems. It also shapes how the concept is presented, what evidence it needs, and which questions must be settled before submission.

Design for whoever signs as well as whoever scores.

Why the order matters

The five questions form a sequence: problem, freedom, judgement, money, power. Each answer informs the next. Without the real problem, you cannot decide which requirements to challenge. Without the evaluation criteria, you invest effort in the wrong parts of the concept. And without clarity on budget and decision-making, even a promising proposal becomes hard to approve or deliver.

Competition briefs are rarely perfect, and not every question will have a definite answer. Finding the gaps early lets the team make conscious decisions instead of building a whole concept on untested assumptions.

Better questions before better sketches

I’m not arguing against sketching early. Visual exploration is essential, and a quick sketch sometimes reveals what no amount of discussion would. The trouble starts when a promising first idea becomes the direction of the project before anyone has tested what it rests on.

In my experience, the difference between an attractive submission and a defensible concept comes down to the quality of thinking before design begins. Five questions won’t guarantee a win. They will help the team solve the right problem, work within real constraints, and develop an idea it can explain, justify and deliver.

Before you answer the brief, question it.

The five questions at a glance

1. What problem are we really solving? Agree the ambition in one sentence before anyone sketches.

2. What is fixed, and what can we challenge? Mark every requirement as fixed or open, and challenge only what you can defend.

3. What is the jury judging? Find the criteria and their weights, and ask in the clarification round if they are missing.

4. What does the budget cover? Check fit-out, multimedia and content, and state your assumptions on the boards.

5. Who makes the final decision? Know who approves the winner, and design for whoever signs as well as whoever scores.

Working on a museum or exhibition competition?

I work with architecture practices, exhibition designers and creative studios to turn complex competition briefs into clear, evidence-based concepts, from research and strategic positioning to narrative and visitor experience. Let's discuss your project.

For more insights on museum design, creative strategy, and the industry, connect with me or follow my posts on LinkedIn.