Daddy, what's a planner?

Whenever there’s been a bad day at the office our creative director has got a great leveller/motivational line:

“It could be worse; we could all be doing real jobs.”

And although it’s meant as a light hearted gag I’ve always thought he’s right, to some degree. Now whether what we do counts as a real job or not is a bigger question. The problem for me is that whilst I find it unproblematic telling my mum the bits about work that make it not a real job, I struggle to actually explain the real job that I do! It’s easy to wax lyrical about the crèche-like atmosphere, table football, well-known brands and boozey lunches, but really difficult to explain what a planner does.

Now, as a planner you’d think this would be easy – a vaguely abstract idea translated into an easy to swallow thought piece. But it’s not. I don’t really know how to explain exactly what I do. It’s a bit like a doctor being the worst patient.

I even looked for advice from the APG and got an even more complex answer listing the variety of characters a planner can play – social anthropologist, brainstorming facilitator, data analyst, think piece polemicist, and so on. None of which are very ‘mum facing’.

I’d like to think that I know what I do (or am at least meant to do), and to be fair there are different types of planners that specialise in different types of fields and that work in very different ways. Yet this is a very ‘inward-facing’ explanation – you get it if you work with planners. However, outside of adland all I end up with is “I do thinky stuff and google a lot” or something vaguely attempting humour (side-stepping the question).

Whilst this plagued me for a while, I’ve decided to give up trying to explain it and have taken a different tact. Rather than think about “What a planner does”, I’ve gone for “Who a planner is”. And I found this (thanks to my boss):

I don’t know who wrote it or where it’s from, but I like it. And in true planning style it distinctly resemble a beer induced back-of-a-fag-packet solution.

So if the client asks, I’m not a planner, I’m an explorer.