A different view of planning at 40.
John Grant: Planning’s Midlife Crisis? from JWT on Vimeo.
I’ve been hesitant about blogging about JWT’s videos from their planning at 40 event. Ed and Paul have made some very good and evenly balanced points about Jon’s speech, and today I think that the only thing left unsaid is the completely partial and biased view.
Thank God for the inclusion of John Grant. Otherwise, I think this event might have felt like a wake. I think it’s a sorry state when a discipline that’s only 40 years old feels its best days are behind it. Has nothing important happened since King and Pollitt codified the planning commandments? When did a discipline that was born from the desire to reform an industry become part of the institution? I’m pretty sure that the first planners battled status quo and dogmatic thinking. Aren’t the planners who practice today the beneficiaries of their efforts, and don’t they have a responsibility to do the same?
I think we can all agree that the world in which our communications operate is fairly different today from the one in which King and Pollitt operated. As the people within agencies most directly responsible for understanding the nuances of the outside world and helping to incorporate those nuances into the creation of communications isn’t the most critical job of the planner today to understand the present (and the future) rather than maintaining strict obedience to the past?
I remember very clearly reading scathing condemnations of planning’s reliance upon qualitative research when it first started taking hold here in the US. Back then these were written by wrinkled old researchers who could see their worlds slowly slipping away. However, the themes were exactly the same, the lack of rigour, the flaky reliance upon creativity, intuition and serendipity are the those currently used to condemn bloggers and blogging.
I was once reminded that there’s a point in everyone’s life where the roles of parent and child reverse and it becomes the child’s responsibility to tell its parents to go sit in the corner. I think that time has come for the child called planning.