The workaround is always the clearest available description of the real problem, and it is always undocumented.
A ferry authority asks for a livery. A materials lab asks for a logo refresh. A quarterly asks for a new cover. In each case the thing being asked for is real, and in each case it is not what is actually wrong. This is not a criticism of clients. It is a structural feature of how organisations notice problems: they notice the surface, because the surface is what they can see, and they describe the surface accurately.
For a while we treated this as something to be diagnosed in the pitch, which is exactly the wrong place. A pitch is a performance, and the performance rewards a studio that sounds certain. What we do now is a paid two-week reading period before the scope is written, and we make it a condition rather than an option. The output is a short document that says what we now think the problem is, and either party can walk after it. Nobody ever has, but the fact that they could is what makes the two weeks honest.
What we go looking for in those two weeks is mostly not design material. It is the emails that get sent repeatedly. The questions the front desk answers all day. The spreadsheet somebody maintains privately because the official system does not do the thing they need. The workaround is always the clearest available description of the real problem, and it is always undocumented, because the person maintaining it does not think of it as work.
The second thing we look for is the last redesign. Every organisation has one, and it always solved something. If you do not know what the previous designer was solving for, you will un-solve it, and you will discover this eighteen months later when someone tells you the new thing is worse. We now ask, formally, in writing: what did the last change fix?
There is a version of this essay that ends with a method. This is not that essay, because the method is not the point — the two weeks are the point. Most of what we get paid for happens before anything is drawn, and pricing that honestly turned out to be a harder redesign than any of the ones described above.