Posts Tagged ‘convergence’

That’s the line that unpacks ‘Planning-ness‘ – an ‘un-planning’ conference held recently in San Francisco.

The idea of “making” things as a way of exploring ideas and developing and articulating strategy is close to our hearts at Made by Many and Planning-ness sounds like a veritable Festival of Awesomeness. I’d love to go next time.

But it was this provocative deck by Jason Oke and Gareth Kay that got us really excited. It’s about the failure of ‘Connections Planning’, the discipline’s historical context, and what it seems to be mutating into – or at least needs to turn into in order to continue mutating.

As someone who is not a planner of any description and doesn’t even work in advertising, I’m not sure I am that entitled to talk about it – although that’s never stopped me before.

It feels like we (the MxM ‘we’) have lots in common with the kind of problems Jason and Gareth are trying to solve, and with the agenda of Planning-ness in general. We come at these problems from a slightly different set of perspectives: Interaction Design, Service Design and Agile Methodologies, but everything is converging – seemingly even our job titles, what we do, and certainly the industries we work in.

Here’s the deck, below. I’ve also picked out some of the highlights (from our MxM perspective). I’m hoping it will provoke a debate inside our company about what we do and how we talk about it – and so, I’m not going to comment too much right now.

I’m also hoping to write something more about the ways we’ve been working experimentally with BBH in very integrated teams on some projects. Mixing what BBH call Engagement Planning up with Interaction Design and Software Development, all within a broadly Agile process, has been really rewarding – and is very relevant to ideas Jason and Gareth set up in Connections Planningness.

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