36) Planner Tips

Thursday morning, I found myself sitting across a Coffee Bean table from a strategic planner who specializes in video games. I had reached out to her in my on-going quest to talk to as many planners as possible, and was gratefully soaking up everything she had to say. She outlined three challenges that she and planners in general face:

1) There is simply so much information out there. No matter how much research - online, secondary, reading reports, interviews, etc. - you do, it never feels like enough. There's only so much you can expose yourself to, only so much you can retain. That being said, a planner's job is never done. There is always something you could be immersing yourself in or reading up on that will help inform your thinking and strategy.

2) Being definitive. Part of a planner's job is to persuade others that your strategy is right. In order to influence work, the creatives have to trust your point of view, so any amount of wavering leeches credibility. This may be intimidating in a still-male-dominated industry, but a planner is useless if s/he can't stand up for and support her own work.

3) Finding the ever-elusive planning mentor. It's easy to think, "If I only had a mentor to provide guidance and teach me the ways..." However, by all accounts this all-knowing and benevolent figure is very rare. Knowing this, it's up to the planner to figure it out as they go, learning from their experiences and trusting their intuitions. Surely they are influenced by the great gurus of planning, and there are some basic methods to the madness. The rest of your skill set relies largely on self-motivation - on y-o-u.

By the time I'd sipped the last of my tea latte, I felt incredibly informed. These planner chats have proven to be one of the most helpful tools in moving forward. Hopefully I'll have new tips to share/record in here every time a meeting occurs.