Just Go and Do What You Want

The hidden cost of a missing brief. Chapter two in a series on how to read, understand, manage, and optimise route setting - written for the people who run climbing walls.

Last month I made a claim: route setting is the product your gym sells, expressed as a conversation you're already having with your customers - whether you're listening or not. I promised that this chapter would start with the most basic and most neglected tool in the building.

So here it is. It's the brief. And the reason it's neglected is that most operators don't think they're skipping it. They think they're being generous.

Walk into a lot of gyms on a setting day and you'll hear some version of this exchange. The setter asks what's wanted on the wall. The manager - busy, trusting, well-meaning - says, “Well, just stick to this grade distribution, but for the rest, just go and do what you want.” It sounds like freedom. It sounds like respect for the craft. It is, in practice, the most expensive sentence in your gym.

Why “do what you want” costs you

Here is the uncomfortable thing about that instruction. It feels like you're empowering a skilled professional. What you're actually doing is abdicating the one decision only you can make: what this gym is for.

A setter, left with no brief, will do exactly what any skilled person does in an information vacuum. They'll fill it with their own preferences. They'll set what they find interesting, what they're good at, what they climbed last weekend, what the other setters will respect. None of that is laziness or ego, it's the only signal available to them. You removed yours, so they used theirs.

Their preferences are not your customers' preferences. The movements a strong, experienced setter finds satisfying are frequently the movements that quietly alienate the lower-mid-grade climbers who make up the bulk of your membership and almost all of your retention. The wall fills up with technically competent routes that no one in particular asked for, aimed at no one in particular, expressing no particular point of view. It isn't bad. It's just nobody's.

Multiply that across every reset, every month, for a year, and you don't have a setting problem. You have a positioning problem that you accidentally outsourced to whoever happened to be holding the drill.

Photo credit: Emile Pino

The setter's side of the same story

Here's the part that should change how you read all of the above. The missing brief isn't only an operator's blind spot. Ask setters, and many describe the exact same gap from the other end of it.

When management stays lightly involved in setting, rarely stepping onto the mats, rarely saying what they're actually trying to achieve, the transmission of intent breaks down. The setters aren't ignoring direction. There isn't any to ignore. They're left on their own with simplistic instructions, asked to produce something valuable from a brief that contains no actual brief. It isn't that no gym ever briefs well - some do - but if proper briefing were genuinely standard practice across the industry, you'd expect to find real tools or services built around measuring how a brief lands and what it does for member satisfaction. That infrastructure barely exists, which tells you how rare a real brief still is.

And then, just as often, they're left out of the conversation after the set too, rarely involved in whether it landed, whether customers engaged, whether it did what it was supposed to do. They set into a void and hear nothing back. Which side of that gap matters more is a fair question, and honestly, the two are close to equally important: setters should still be free to challenge and surprise climbers - that's part of the craft, and members don't always know what they want until they're given it. But surprise only works as a positive when it's a deliberate strategy rather than an accident, agreed between gym manager and setter in advance and communicated as such, rather than assumed.

So the same silence wounds both sides. The operator loses control of what the gym says to its customers. The setter loses the one thing that makes the work meaningful and improvable: knowing what they were aiming at, and whether they hit it.

There's another layer worth naming here: a setter's own psychology shapes what ends up on the wall almost as much as any brief does. A setter whose driving instinct is to set cool routes - routes that impress - is working in territory that's genuinely risky for your relationship with your members. You'll get routes people admire. You won't necessarily get routes that serve them. The safer instinct belongs to the setter who sets for the climbers in front of them, because those are the routes that actually educate your members over time. One is an artist, capable of something extraordinary. The other is a professional service provider. Those are two different jobs, and it's worth knowing which one you've hired.

That instinct is often shaped by where the setter sits in your business, too. An external contractor typically has less skin in the game than a setter who's a founding partner of the gym - and the same question is worth asking of an employee. None of this is decisive on its own, but these small psychological realities can weigh heavily on what actually shows up on the wall.

This reframes the brief entirely. It isn't management imposing on craft. It's the common language that lets management and setters stop guessing at each other - the shared sentence that says here's what we're trying to do, here's why, and here's how we'll know it worked. Get that language right and the brief stops being a control document. It becomes the thing both sides were quietly missing.

What a brief actually is

A brief is not a leash. This is the fear, usually unspoken, that stops operators writing one - that to brief a setter is to micromanage an artist, to crush the creativity that makes the work good in the first place.

Drop that fear. A brief doesn't tell a setter how to set. It tells them what the gym needs from this set and then it gets out of the way. The craft, the movement, the creative solution: that stays entirely theirs. You're not painting the picture. You're commissioning it. There's a world of difference between “paint me a slab in this corner, mid-range, something playful for our weekend family crowd” and standing over someone's shoulder mixing the colours.

A good brief, at heart, does two things: it names an intention, and it names the vision behind it. And it answers four questions, no more. It should fit on one page, and honestly it should fit on half of one.

1) what grades, and where. Not every route - the band, and it's a target to set toward, not a floor to clear. “We're light on V2–V3 on the main wall and the comp wall is top-heavy again.” This single line does more for your retention than any marketing campaign you'll run this quarter, because it forces the set to serve your actual membership rather than drift toward whatever the setters find fun. There's a deeper point hiding here, which a later chapter will pull apart: difficulty shouldn't really be the creative point of a set at all - it should be a distribution that matches your customers, freeing the setter to spend their creativity on the experience rather than the number. For now, just naming the band is enough.

2) what style or intent. A sentence is enough. Playful and juggy for the family zone. Technical and balancy on the slab. Powerful on the steep. You are not prescribing moves; you're naming the experience you want a customer to have when they walk up to that section. This is where, if you've been listening to your customers, what you've heard turns into something real on the wall.

It helps to separate the vision from the intention. A vision describes a wished-for future - “at the end of the day we'll have…” - but a vision on its own rarely gives a setter enough to work with, because the gap between any vision and what actually lands on the wall is inevitable.

An intention describes a direction instead of an endpoint:

“we want a series of technically simple boulders” is an intention; “...

because we want our newer climbers to feel good on the wall” is the vision behind it.

That gives a setter something to push back against constructively –

“given the wall's angle and what's in the hold store, that mostly means dynos, is that still what you want?” and the conversation continues from there until both sides are genuinely aligned.

For the setter, that makes contested calls easier to resolve. For the operator, it means selling something you're actually proud of, rather than crossing your fingers.

3) the why behind it. The single most powerful thing you can add, and the thing almost everyone omits.

“We've had three complaints this month that the easy routes are sandbagged.”

“A members' poll said the steep wall is intimidating for improvers.”

When a setter understands the customer signal driving the brief, two things happen: they make better micro-decisions than any brief could specify, and they stop feeling like they're taking dictation. They're solving a real problem for real people. That's motivating. That's the difference between an instruction and a collaboration.

4) how we'll know it's done. A sign-off. When the set goes up, someone confirms out loud, on paper that it's clean, safe, correctly graded as far as anyone can tell, and ready to climb. Not a quality tribunal. A full stop. In most gyms this moment simply doesn't exist; routes go live because the setters stopped working, not because anyone decided they were ready. That gap is where your safety incidents and your grading complaints both live.

It also gives you something to watch for afterwards that isn't just safety and grading: whether the members who never complain - because they don't have the vocabulary or the confidence to - are quietly happier. That's the closest thing you have to a measurement tool for the customers you never hear from directly.

The template you can steal

Here is the whole thing. Print it, butcher it, put your logo on it. The format matters far less than the fact that it exists.

Setting brief — [date] — [zone/wall/location]

Grade focus: which grade bands, which walls — the target we're setting toward, not a floor

Style / intent: the experience we want here — one sentence

Why: the customer signal behind this — feedback, data, a gap noticed, coach request

Constraints: holds reserved, anything off-limits, deadlines, events

Set by: ____   Foreran by: ____   Signed off ready: ____ (initial / date / time)

That's it. If your gym has nothing like it today, and most don't, adopting it will feel almost embarrassingly basic. Good. The basic version, used every single time, beats the sophisticated version that lives in someone's head and gets explained differently every reset.

The objection you're about to raise

“My setters are experienced. They don't need this. They know the gym.”

Maybe. But notice what that defence is actually doing. It's assuming that the knowledge of what your gym is for lives reliably, consistently, in your setters' heads and that it's the same knowledge in each of their heads, and that it won't walk out the door when one of them takes a job at the gym across the road. A brief doesn't exist because your setters are incapable. It exists because the gym's intent should not be tacit knowledge held hostage by individual memory. It should be written down, repeatable, and survivable.

The best setters we've worked with don't resent a brief. They're relieved by it. It tells them the problem is real, the target is shared, and when they nail it, everyone will agree they nailed it because everyone agreed in advance what nailing it meant. Ambiguity isn't a gift to a professional. Clarity is.

The one idea to take away

If you do one thing after reading this, replace “just go and do what you want” with four lines on a page: what grades, what feeling, why, and how we'll know it's ready.

You are not constraining your setters. You're finally telling them what game they're playing and giving them the one piece of information only you have. The creativity was never the problem. The silence was and it was costing both sides at once.

Next month: the metric every operator tracks, why it's quietly lying to you, and what you should be counting instead. We'll talk about productivity and the difference between paying for routes and buying returns.

This is chapter two of an ongoing series. If your gym already runs a brief that works, or you've watched a missing one cause chaos, tell the story in the comments. The good ones may end up in a future chapter.

About the Authors

Jez Tapping is an indoor climbing industry consultant with over 20 years in the sector, including as former Regional Climbing Manager and Head of Climbing at one of the UK's busiest indoor climbing centres. He holds a BA in Sports Development and Coaching and an Masters in Sports Management, sat on the board of NICAS for 9 years, and is Chief Commercial Officer of the Global Climbing Standard. His work spans commercial strategy, governance, operational improvement and coaching programme development for climbing gyms and federations worldwide.

Jérôme Meyer is a French professional climber turned route-setting entrepreneur. A four-time Bouldering World Cup champion (2001, 2002, 2003, 2006), he retired from competition in 2008 and went on to serve as the Olympic and Sport Director within World Climbing. He is now co-founder and CEO of Circle, a global platform connecting climbing gyms, route setters, and hold brands through 3D route-setting technology.