NORTHERN PLANNER

When I started out as a planner I didn't really have a clue what I was doing. No planning director mentor type person, little time spent with planners as a distinctly average suite none of that. All I got was a a few (useful) APG courses, the generosity of planner blogs and the suspicion I'd never really been a suit, but a sort of planner who always always lost, forgot to invoices and far too shy.

And that is why I'm convinced I've survived out here where planners are both rare and, largely unwanted. Much of 'being a planner' has involved figuring out what a planner actually is. And that has largely been a good thing.

 When you're a little scared because you don't know something you really should, you work bloody hard to make up for it and, here's the good bit, the lack of constraints from 'rules' provides all sorts of possibilitily that's absent from 'doing it properly' .

Contrast that with knowing it all -  you stop trying, you stop developing and just like a shark, when you stop moving forward, you die. When you're no longer an idiot, you're fishfood.

That's why I still love it when I'm nervous, when I don't think I quite know what I'm doing. It's those times, when you're Using the Force, when all you've got is your instincts, when you're the most likely to do something great, that no one else will because you won't be doing it like them; for Gods sake, you don't KNOW how to do it like them. I like it when I'm making it up as I go along.

Which is why I like stuff, people and situations that shock me to death, make me uncomfortable, have no respect for me at all (yes I know that's everyone) and make me mad, angry and even scared. That's why I like digital stuff, lets be honest, no one really knows how to 'do it', come to think of, no one knows how to 'do' old school advertising either, they just try and bring in 'sciency' rubbish that makes it look that way – sometimes they even believe the sciency rubbish.

There's another by product of not knowing anything. It doesn't have much respect for authority and experience it doesn't have any time to kiss someone arse for what they did 10 years ago or even 10 minutes ago. 

The problem with tried and tested people with all that experience and knowledge is that they tend to do things the same way every time and, according to Einstein, doing the same thing over and over, with the expectation of a different result is the very definition of insanity (I'm presuming this was before anyone was getting to grips with quantum mechanics by the way) which is what 'The Disruption Agency' is such a contradiction in terms. As soon as you have a process for Disruption (and believe me they have. In triplicate) guess what happens? Dead right.

So if you're in am agency that 'doesn't do it right', if you haven't got a world famous, genius mentor, if you've been asked to do something right out of your comfort zone, your head feels like it's going to explode, you don't know what you're doing or how the hell you'll figure it out…good. That's right where you want to be as far as I'm concerned. Figure it out, make it work, you're probably about to do the best work of your life. 

Don't accept what someone else tells you just because they're older, more important, more famous or whatever. Be a pain in the arse, question everything; authority, the process, the ideas, the research. Everything.

Forget all that 'you can't break the rules until you know what they are' claptrap. You're at your most lethal when you don't even know what they are.