Rethinking Strategic Planning

Planning-ness is a crowdsourced conference best defined by its philosophical tagline, “Get excited and make things happen.” Every one of us talks about wanting the same thing from our meetings, but when we get down to the actual mapping, programming and timelines, we often fall back on what we know, what’s comfortable.

While conferences like Planning-ness and the more well-known and wildly popular TED conferences are contradictory to the traditional top-down format of corporate meetings and might seem daunting or threatening, they produce innovative results and enviable engagement. Another upside to a crowdsourced event is that you, as the meeting or event planner, don’t have to carry the whole load: Your attendees want to do it for you—and, usually, they share more passion, knowledge and insight about subjects on the agenda than trainers.

These new formats force you to rethink your role, though. “The expanding universe means planners need to be much more creative,” says Ed Cotton, a branding and marketing expert who participated in the 2011 Planning-ness event in Minneapolis, May 19-20. Cotton is talking about strategists in all types of roles and businesses when he predicts the emergence of two types of planners, the specialist and the generalist. The former will understand evolving technologies and behaviors, and the latter will know a little bit about everything and act more as a producer, bringing in specialists when they’re needed and working with them in-house.

Knowing which type of planner you are is going to be very important, he says. The changing demands also have big implications for companies trying to decide what mix of skills are needed in the future. Strategists need design and programming skills, as well as the ability to facilitate and lead brainstorming.

“This transformation has big implications for agencies trying to work out what mix of skills their planning departments need to have, but also for educators who have to equip future planning talent with the skills,” says Cotton. “Educators are just going to have to get broader and equip planning students with more specialist skills, but the area that has to be developed is creative; planners need to be good at making stuff and that’s going to take some teaching.”

Scott Klososky, a technology and leadership speaker who addresses the impact of future trends on organizations, echoes his point. “Planners carry the burden and should take responsibility for being innovative,” he told meeting planners at the Professional Convention Management Association’s annual conference in Las Vegas at the beginning of the year. “To build value at an event, we need to grab mindshare.”

While you may be edging your way into new trends like crowdsourcing, Klososky encourages all planners to move forward boldly. “Even the smallest improvements in leveraging these [technology tools and trends] can propel your organization to leapfrog your competitors.”

For Cotton, the good news is that planning still really matters. “The challenge is to get it working in a way that’s right for the times.”

5 Lessons from Planning-ness
The Planning-ness conference brings together progressive thinkers, marketers, psychologists and strategists to tackle questions related to what makes us tick, giving participants food for thought to take back to their organizations. While not specifically addressing meeting and event planners, the conference offers valuable lessons nonetheless for all strategists:

1. Planners work pretty well together; departments should encourage much more real and virtual collaboration.

2. The current “well of knowledge” contains familiar themes in danger of repeating themselves. Doing versus saying, decoding behavior and telling stories are all vital and highly relevant, but they need to be translated into practical apps for a planner’s toolkit.

3. Problem identification is a key role planners can play. It’s needed more than ever and this is knowledge that can be practically applied to real, rather than abstracted solutions.

4. Planning still suffers from many of the issues that have plagued the discipline since its inception. As everyone knows, planning is more about “the planner” than the discipline, but more work could be done to codify the role and showcase its power.

5. Planners need to be creatives. They need to spend as much time thinking how they are going to tell their stories as they spend finding the stories in the first place. What can they make tangible?

Sources: planningness.com, ted.com, influxinsights.com, klososky.com, influxinsights.com