If you’re going to get lost, get lost with a planner.

“Then there are the planners. Who, on the outside tend to appear super calm, super open and generous all the time. No matter how you feel inside, you are the one who cannot lose your temper, have to earn your place in any meeting, have to look like you know what you are talking about even when you haven’t a clue and, know as much about everything as you can – be a super generalist, make the dullest subject matter seem interesting and, perhaps hardest of all, have to make the few gaps in others drawing breath count, as these are the only seconds you’ll get to say something.”

That’s probably the best description of planners and planning I’ve ever read. 

Andrew Hovell paints a pretty good portrait of what it’s like to be a planner.

“Yep, most planners tend to do something which has nothing to do with planning out of the office. For some, that might be amateur dramatics, for others it might be venting spleen in a blog. Many find an outlet through sport. But rest assured, planners tend to have many outside interests. They may cultivate a persona of ‘being curious’ or ‘making sure they are interesting by being interested’- but mark my words, it’s all to do with making sure they don’t have melt down when someone tells them they’ve missed the breakfast serving by one minute.
All that extra stuff outside the office, couple with the factory visits, the cultural research, having to know what a fifteen year old finds interesting, while understanding what the hell your cloud computing security B2B client actually does, means planners have tons of pointless knowledge. This puts planet sized weight on the shoulders whenever there is a quiz. If there is some sort of agency quiz night, planners will never vote for a department based team structure, the expectation to win is simply too great.”

 

(picture courtesy of Frinkiac)

So if you’re going to get lost, get lost with a planner. We’re so used to it, we always deal with it pretty well.