What is Strategic Planning?
Thursday, November 5, 2009
When I was down at the Future Trends conference earlier this week, Rick Smyre told an interesting little anecdote that got me thinking about what I do for a living. A few years ago Rick was speaking with a big shot exec from a big shot global corporation, and this exec told Rick that his company was doing away with their Strategic Planning department, and shifting to what he called Adaptive Planning. Rick asked this exec, "Why?" The exec told Rick that Strategic Planning is founded on two basic assumptions that no longer hold true: 1) You can predict outcomes and 2) You can control the process.
Wikipedia defines the discipline as "the formal consideration of an organization's future course."
The world has changed. The new reality that this exec described sounds like it applies to the digital space. The fact that you can't know for sure what's going to happen and that the experiences and messages we design need to be able to adapt, has been a constant motif in my thinking over the past few years.
I wonder what you think? What does Strategic Planning mean to you? What do you think of those two basic assumptions? Should the discipline be called something else for the digital age we live and work in now?
A few thoughts from Twitter to kick off the discussion:
Brian Chiger: I understood it to be about understanding consumers emotions/behavior & serving their needs.
Andy Hunter: always figrd stratplan=having informed (v.s reactive) course of action, knowing those u serve, doing things better.
Wikipedia defines the discipline as "the formal consideration of an organization's future course."
The world has changed. The new reality that this exec described sounds like it applies to the digital space. The fact that you can't know for sure what's going to happen and that the experiences and messages we design need to be able to adapt, has been a constant motif in my thinking over the past few years.
I wonder what you think? What does Strategic Planning mean to you? What do you think of those two basic assumptions? Should the discipline be called something else for the digital age we live and work in now?
A few thoughts from Twitter to kick off the discussion:
Brian Chiger: I understood it to be about understanding consumers emotions/behavior & serving their needs.
Andy Hunter: always figrd stratplan=having informed (v.s reactive) course of action, knowing those u serve, doing things better.
17 Comments:
i like to think that it's something about discover new things (consumer behaviour, trends, new technologies, whatever...) and bring it into a context. And this context can be a simple little experience or a long term brand building.
I think it's easy to look at the current landscape and think we're in some new reality where the old paradigms no longer apply, but hasn't dramatic change always been part of the equation? If you were a planner in the first half of the 20th century movies, radio, television, outdoor advertising, stock market crash, world wars, etc. all would have greatly affected your brand plans. Yes, things move fast now, but they always have.
Isn't the point of strategy - at least good strategy - to take dynamic, unpredictable change into account? Shouldn't a good strategic plan allow for a change in *tactics* based on shifting realities?
I have a hard time coming up with a better title than Strategic Planner. Whether you are the Offensive Coordinator for the Pittsburgh Steelers or the Superintendant of Schools for Union County, New Jersey, you are in effect, a Strategic Planner.
Hey Mike -
Intriguing post, including suggesting "adaptive planning" as a better term for strategic planning.
I've used "addressing things that matter with insight and innovation" as a general definition for strategic thinking. Along with that has come a very modular approach to planning that only introduces the elements necessary for a management team to keep moving as it refines a plan.
Even beyond the digital world, "things that matter" can change (sometimes rapidly); I'd agree that adaptive planning is a more relevant descriptor for what businesses need to be doing right now.
Mike Brown (@Brainzooming)
Not an answer, per se, but this post asking the same question cracked me up.
Equilibriums are real, which means that even if you can't be linear, and things are emergent, they do in fact emerge in a predictable enough manner that you don't have to drive your business off a cliff.
When you go hiking, you look at a map and know what terrain constitutes the boundaries of play. Sure, I can't predict that I will fall and break my leg, but I can predict that I will not end up east of that mountain or west of this other mountain, or south, or north. Knowing the ground is better than just grabbing your GPS and walking.
Seeing business performance for the last twenty years, it should be apparent that the issues are not strategic planning or not. The issue centers of excuses, incorrect metrics, and gross incompetence of non-founders who try to achieve founder results. Or founders who follow ortho practices and then complain that innovation is the wrong way to go, never appending "for me," to their claims.
If strategic planning stopped working, when did that happen, and why?
And, last, in adaptive development approaches like Agile, sure the overhead is gone, but so it the premium. The thin deliverables are easy to copy. The thing has no depth. As we go thin, we provide less value, We are the water from the broken glass spreading out, drying up, killing out businesses.
Planning needs to be more about doing. It needs to be involved in collaborative agile scrums with creatives or technologists to help shape the structure and effectiveness of an response not just had over a brief.
Insight generation seems to be built all too frequently around the barriers to communication but it could be more about potential benefits, utility and cultural opportunities if strategic planning were to spread upstream in the process and get involved in client NPD.
But spreading influence up and downstream should not mean diluting deeper analysis and thought to become a Jack of all trades.
It is important that the deep dive methodology of good strategic planning and insight generation is maintained.
Instead of working alone, perhaps planners could adopt the partnership or team structure used in creative departments to combine different skillsets or areas of expertise (data/financial paired with behavioural & technology insight)?
Our skillset should apply not only to communications, but also to the world beyond. There is a conflict between what “planning” wants to do, what planners really do, and the simple truth that “planning,” as we know it today, might best be practiced outside the advertising community.
http://www.psfk.com/2009/11/redscout-presents-spur-episode-1-is-planning-impotent.html
I think there's an inherent problem with a business discipline trying to define itself.
First, planners who are exposed mostly to other planners' ideas, read other planners' blogs, and tend to agree with what's written there, will inevitably consolidate what they already know. This means that they will be less open to doing things differently, and to be able to offer a fresh perspective on business challenges they encounter.
More importantly, there is also this: whether a planner did a good or bad job is ultimately (in their everyday work) not assessed by other planners. It's assessed by everyone else - the people that planners work for: creatives, UX, developers, account people, project managers, and ultimately, the client. It is those people that are the planners' real audience.
So maybe we should ask THEM what they think how account planning may be today...
Otherwise, it's just an echo-chamber. And this is its perfect example: "Planning was conceived as the thinking behind creativity. But the conventional planner has become a caricature: thinking in an ivory tower and post-rationalizing the doing of others. But today – as the industry, agency, and world-at-large have evolved – the definition of planning, and its future, is unclear."
Seems to me that, with this approach, we remain in an ivory tower. This time, without even realizing it.
Great comments. It's so important to keep having these discussions. "Basic assumptions" can lead us down damaging and at the very least boring, uninspired paths.
I also like that Andy Hunter said, "...doing things better" I've been doing some thinking about that recently. You can check out a little slide set I put together about it. http://twurl.nl/xtjwyw
Nice post!
That 'Strategic Planning is founded on two basic assumptions that know (sic) longer hold true: 1) You can predict outcomes and 2) You can control the process' – is news to me! Those more aptly describe the job title of ‘Madame Ruby, Palm Reader’ and ‘Sherman, Line Inspector.’
I had no idea I’d have such a strong reaction to this short posting - especially since I’ve only been officially @ Planning for the last 12 months (last 14 yrs as a creative).
'Adaptive' Planning? Ewww. I definitely don't care for the label and would avoid a job posting with that title. Sounds way, way too reactive. 'Adaptive' should be a strategy employed when necessary; a descriptor, like ‘nimble’ or ‘articulate;’ a mindset. Sure, contingent thinking is part of the job, but I still want to go about the business of planning and building a brand.
My other beefs: For one thing, ‘Adaptive Planning’ sounds like an oxymoron. And another? No offense to my PR friends, but it sounds too much like crises management.
Looks to me like the Big Shot exec in the story you lead off with had a pretty fucked up idea of what Strategic Planning was.
Predict outcomes? Control the process?! I don't even know what that is supposed to mean (and I bet he didn't either).
Thanks for the great comments and range of reactions.
I think it's remarkable how a discipline could spark such a heated discussion simply around the idea of attempting to define it. My guess is that it's a result of having such a vague title - "Planner". The word, as it's used in our industry, is not self explanatory; in fact, it's jargon. I've had a problem with the title since I first decided to get into this career.
That said, I do think that it's worthwhile to define what we do. And I do believe that what we typically do does involve developing strategies and plans for how to get from here to there.
Talking to people about what we do doesn't have to be complicated or mysterious. At its most elemental, companies come to us with a with a desire to change their situation for the better. They may or may not know where they are currently, but they know where they want to go.
We create a plan for the best way for them to get from where they are to where they want to go.
And whether it's at the heart of the discipline or not, I still think part of our process does usually include making predictions - "if you do this, then that is likely to happen" - and assuming that once things get started, the people working on getting from here to there will be able to control how they go about doing that.
Both of those assumptions have been undermined by the exigencies of digital technology.
In my opinion, that has big implications for how we work.
Very interesting comments. David J Carrs' stood out especially: what he said about how planners should work with other people in a team and more importantly multi-task. I'm trying to get my head around the exact definition of planning as well - how different is strategic planning from adaptive planning from propagation planning and so on. Adaptive planning, as someone said above, is a bit of an oxymoron in literal terms but your big-shot exec had a point - planning needs to move with the times. Propagation planning for example didn't even exist in the pre-digital age because there were no tools for users to play with content.
Planning needs to be solution-oriented. Planning as a discipline that provides foresight for a business is one thing (typically what strategic planning does), but as a discipline that solves an issue, or resolves a situation, is another. I know what I just said probably has an element of crisis management floating somewhere around it, but I like to think of it more as generating conversations. Conversation planning, maybe? Because if you plan for people to talk positively, give them tools to do that etc, then you plan for the business to succeed.
My two cents!
Interesting debate. Thanks for sparking & curating.
Couple of things to throw in. Though quick caveat. I don't know the answer.
One, the question 'what is a planner?" is the second most difficult to answer of any I've ever been asked (the first is "who created God?", from my 4-year old son, Tom). My parents still have no idea what I do. They've given up asking, because I can't seem to give them a good answer.
Two, account or strategic planning within ad agencies or communications agencies surely ONLY exists to be at the service of the broader creative business. I have little patience with planners who think their role is to be a planner. It's to help create awesome output that makes clients money.
Three (and linked), for me it's all about insights. An old-fashioned word, maybe, but still I believe that's the currency of good strategic thinkers.
Four, titles and labels don't matter. It's what you do, not what you're called, that matters. I'd avoid new labels as much as possible, even though I am myself guilty on multiple counts of label invention.
Finally, here are some guiding principles I tried to embed within the planning group here at BBH NY during the short time they put up with me as Head of Account Planning. Not official policy or anything, just my take on how planners should go about doing what they do.
1. Be the first creative department
2. Master the client’s business model
3. The magic is in the product
4. Own the customer journey
5. Commit through to execution & beyond
6. Collapse linear process
7. Bravery in the face of conservatism
8. Positivity in the face of adversity
9. Generosity in what we do & how we do it
10. Cut through the crap - be the distiller
Thankful for the debate. A couple more lines to throw in: Planners find the best intersection between culture, brand and consumer. We UNDERSTAND WHY a brand should do something, DEFINE WHAT a brand should do and give indication HOW a brand should IMPLEMENT it to reach a higher level. Drawing the right conclusions and bringing insight and knowledge in the right context are crucial in complex marketing environments.
I'm not sure changing the name would do much, but rethinking the purpose of planning may help remedy the frustrations your article highlights.
Planners shouldn't just see themselves as advertising people; their role can extend to helping brands to deliver their benefits across the entirety of the marketing mix.
In this context, it might be more helpful to see planning as:
"the process of identifying the most relevant and engaging times and places to deliver specific brand benefits, and the most efficient and effective ways to deliver those benefits in that context." (from here)
From that perspective, planning (or whatever we want to call it) has much greater scope to create real value for the brand.
It's never a great sign when a discipline is constantly renaming itself. It reminds of my former life in graduate school. That being said, we've been doing it from the beginning and we seem to going strong if not stronger than ever.
I agree with all the posters who say our discipline is not about predicting the future. Accurately describing the present is hard enough.
I also agree, however,that we, as planners need to increasingly help optimize brand experiences across broader dimensions of time and space. My most frequent question to myself and creatives these days is "so what does the consumer do next?" We're all trying to create and imagine flows (to borrow a term from IA) of consumer behavior from experience to experience.
Post a Comment
<< Home