This is Ernest Rutherford, the father of nuclear physics.
I like him because I’m a bit of science geek. I also admire the way he shows logic as nothing without ideas. At its best, cience can be beautiful.
It can surprise you, throw things up at you that you might not expect. You have to be ready for them so you can sieze the chance to move things forward – and suddenly everything you know is wrong. Time to think around some corners.
Once upon a time, he was shooting alpha particles through gold foil. Everthing they thought they knew about atoms should have meant that they all came out the other side – but they didn’t.
Every now and again, something pushed some back. This was totally perplexing since conventional wisdom on atoms said this wasn’t possible. It took a piece of pure, unadulterated genius thinking to make the leap that atoms must have a concentrated nucleus. It was herecy, but it had to be true.
He wasn’t looking for it, but he’d discovered the foundation of modern physics. A wonderful marriage of observation and creative thought.
And that’s why great science inspires me as planner. You can’t avoid doing hard work – you have to do the rigour bit, there are no short cuts. But hard work isn’t enough. You need an open mind, you need to be able to look at things in a slightly different way. That’s planning to me.
I wanted to be good at science, but I couldn’t do the maths. I still like solving puzzles though. That’s another reason I like what I do, sometimes in my own small way, I get to feel a little bit like Rutherford probably did.
By the way I’m off out to Leicester today. I’m having a meeting less than a mile from my old University (not the poly. I’ll be seeing the students malingering about, and no doubt I will feel very, very old.
NORTHERN PLANNER 
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