On Planners Talking With Planners About Planning
Or, how to not be the philosophical carpenter in the room.
One of the things planners most like doing is talking to other planners about planning-related things. Sure, our jobs in a massive way are to be able to de-construct a certain topic and re-construct it in (hopefully) a new light. But I wonder if it’s really doing us that much good — or to use an industry-related jargon, if by focusing too much on that we’re truly adding value.
What often happens is that discussions lead to semantic disputes around the work and the job, which is the exact thing that pissed me off about intellectuals and academics when I was a kid in uni. Grab a certain idea or perspective, re-package it with a new label which is different enough that allows you to call it proprietary and ta-dah, you just contributed to the corpus of that topic!
In the planning world (and broadly the advermarketingPR world, to quote Matt Muir), this often leads to heated discussions about syntax when in fact sometimes we’re all just saying the same thing in different ways. After all, an idea doesn’t just need to be connected but also connectable, and apparently positioning and distinctiveness are two completely different things, and whether an insight unlocks, inspires, liberates or creates a springboard and whether it’s a human, category, product, media or cultural insight…
… well, let’s not go there for now because I want to keep this short.
The point is that sometimes we get too stuck on the definitions of things when in fact, in theory, the job is pretty simple. To (kinda) quote Ramzi Yakob in his excellent article Business Strategy is Simple and Russell Davies a few years before, it’s in the doing that things get tough. In other words:
[This job is] not complicated, it’s just hard.
Planning itself also isn’t complicated, just hard. Sure, sometimes it’s important to go back to the core definitions of what we’re doing, but every time I see a semantic debate I go back to those uni years in which I remember clearly thinking academics basically invented new ways to say the same things and called it a job. Which I’m pretty sure is not what being a planner is about (even though this guy might disagree).
Don’t get me wrong — I often end up swallowed by these debates as well, which makes me as guilty as the next person doing this for a living. But I sure don’t like to think that my job is to be a pure academic about how marketing works but rather a practitioner of making marketing work. Regardless of discipline, I’m sure that’s the case for most of us.
As planners we should talk with each other, especially as this industry implodes and transforms itself before our very eyes and suddenly we’re not sure if what we’re doing is a brand thing or a digital thing or a comms thing or a product thing or an organisational thing or a transformation thing or everything and nothing at the same time. Things in this field are pretty messed up and we do need that hand holding, that ‘ok let’s go back to basics’ debate every now and then.
But at the same time I have mixed feelings about it. A good comparison comes from carpentry. A good carpenter doesn’t spend his day arguing with other carpenters about the point of a toolbox. Instead, they all focus on mastering the uses of the toolbox to build things. If I need a custom built chair for my back problem I don’t want a carpenter to go all philosophical on the purpose of sitting or how human spines are about to be disrupted by standing desks. I just need a chair. So a good carpenter builds a good chair that suits my particular needs.
In other words, for a carpenter, mastering the toolbox is important but the tools are just a means, not an end. The difference here is that, with strategy, a lot of these notions aren’t mutually exclusive. A hammer isn’t a wrench, but a category insight may overlap with a cultural insight, which ultimately makes the whole definition debate kinda pointless. It doesn’t matter what you call it as long as you know what to do with it afterwards.
Building a chair isn’t complicated, it’s just fucking hard. There’s something in here we can all apply to our jobs, I think. If we want to be useful, let’s avoid being the philosophical carpenter in the room. Debating the tools is fine as a way to master them, but ultimately let’s help build a great chair.
(I appreciate the irony that this is a philosophical article about how planners spend too much time talking about philosophical things, but hey, ¯\_(ツ)_/¯)
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Hello! I’m Rob, a freelance content strategist who delivers simple and practical strategies based on a solid understanding of technology, brand building and human nature. Find out more about me at estreitinho.com.
