The Last Person Has to Do It
One person reads a brief off this screen. Nobody else ever sees it. It goes down the line the way it always has — out loud, one person at a time — and the person at the end has to actually do the thing. Then the screen shows what the brief said all along, and which half of it made the trip.
A written brief — do this, keep it short, never say that, and finish with the other thing — gets passed along by four people out loud. Something always survives intact and something always dies. Which part of the brief is most likely to still be there at the end?
The chain is not in here. This screen shows the brief to one person and takes the last person's answer. Everything between those two is you lot talking — no typing, no turns, no device to pass around. Line people up, and keep everyone but the first out of sight of the screen.
Showing it here suits a table everyone is sitting at — the first person reads it and you hide it again. Sending it to a phone suits a room where the screen is projected, or where the first person should be the only one who could possibly have seen it.
Read it until you have it. Then hide it and start the chain out loud — you may not write anything down, and neither may anyone else.
The first person points their phone camera at this code — the normal camera app, nothing to install and no account. The brief opens on their phone and nowhere else. Keep this screen on this page; it is where the last person will type.
Whatever reached you is the brief now. Do what it asked — write the actual thing, not a description of it. Nobody else may help, and nobody may look anything up.
What the brief actually asked for
The brief nobody after the first person saw
What arrived
The edge case nobody built
A customer says "renew it automatically — unless they've claimed twice this year." By the time it reaches the developer it is "renew it automatically." The exception was the entire reason for the request, and it is the first thing a chain drops, because it is the hardest clause to hold in your head while summarising the rest.
The runbook step that moved
"Drain the node, then restart the service" becomes "drain the node and restart the service" one handover later. Both sentences name the same two actions and only one of them is safe. Ordering is invisible in a summary — it survives as a word like "then", which reads like filler and gets edited out first.
"I told them exactly what to do"
You did — and they repeated it to the person who actually does it. Nouns transfer beautifully down a chain; the conditions attached to them do not. The test of a delegated brief is not whether it was understood, it is whether it can be re-told and still be right.
Same failure, one hop
Ask for a summary of a document that itself summarised a brief and you have run this game with machines in the seats. The losses land in the same places: the negations, the unlesses, the ordering. What survives compression is what was concrete, which is exactly backwards from what mattered.
Put the conditions first
Chains compress from the end and from the middle. A brief that opens with its exception — "if there is a number in it, everything below changes" — keeps it, because the first clause is the one people retell first while they still have room.
Make them do it, not say it
"Does that make sense?" is answered yes by someone who has lost the exception, because they do not know it is gone. Ask them to carry it out, or to tell it back to a third person — a retelling is the only test that catches a silent loss.
A brief is not one thing that degrades evenly — it is a bundle of rules with wildly different survival rates. Objects and actions travel; conditions, order, negations and exceptions fall off, and those are almost always the rules the brief existed for. So when the work finally gets done wrong, the person who did it was following what they were given. The failure happened three people earlier, and nobody in the chain could see it happening.