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Planning 2.0: beware of paradigm shift, by John Griffiths, CDP I was stirred to these musings when I read that Bill Gates had described Psion as one of the greatest threats to Microsoft. A 350 billion dollar colossus threatened by a company with a hundredth of its capitalisation. Why on earth? Well because Psion is working within a different paradigm to that of Microsoft, and Gates is worried that the new paradigm will take over. Microsoft is I suppose (along with Apple) the desktop company par excellence, defined forever by its credo "a computer on every desktop in every company and in every home." Psion on the other hand makes handheld computers. It is working within the paradigm of mobility. Space saving code, extremes in battery conservation, ability to communicate seamlessly with mobile phones and desktop computers, Psion's products could come to dominate the world of mobile work as Microsoft has come to dominate the world of the desktop. What has all of this got to do with planning? Gates's paranoia derives from a paradigmatic shift in what work is and how it is done. Potentially this shift is even more fundamental than the arrival of the Internet, which almost wrong footed Microsoft. Account planning came into being when there was a paradigm shift between working in a department and working with a workgroup. Researchers working from an advertising research departments could not work responsively enough and so account planning came into being. Brought into the heart of the account team, planning hasn't changed in a generation. But it could be about to. Workgroups might still be departmentally structured (that old saw about where the planners ought to sit) but the "work" was done in meetings and then predominantly at desk, wherever that desk was situated. As computer networks proliferated, the desk became even more important. But for most of the last 30 years planners have been tied to their desks. Deriving a consumer perspective was always a bit tricky but thanks to qualitative research, planners had a ready-made solution to bring consumer thinking to bear. The discussion group form has allowed planners to assemble a consumer perspective relatively efficiently with a few brief forays out into the real world returning triumphantly with a quasi-objective result. Stick with me here. What happens when technology makes it possible for planners to stay out in the field and to develop rolling hypotheses about the strategic solution without having to turn up in the office every day to debrief the rest of the team? When the richness of consumer feedback can be represented more fully than through 10 overheads scribbled out hastily on the train back in the morning. Perhaps the role change could be more fundamental: perhaps the creative team get sent into the field while the planner as some kind of symbolic analyst/cracksman stays back at base. Keep going. Perhaps the whole team ends up working together as a task force out in the field, particularly as agency financial bosses start to try to work out why they're still paying a fortune for prime office space. Perhaps with all of that richness of input supplemented by information feeds from roving qualitative researchers, we can dispense with account planning altogether. This isn't some kind of technological determinism here. As ever, technology facilitates. But if the workgroup is changing its nature, and the workgroup brought account planning into existence, then when the paradigm shifts hold onto your hat. And if I'm right then we'll need a whole new skillset and tools that have yet to be developed. The way in which we use research will change radically. We'd have time to watch what people do. We could use the products or sell the products all week instead of for the statutory half an hour briefing. We could get consumer feedback on the details of campaign execution and the inter- relationship between communications media, stuff we simply don't have time to do at present because it costs too much and takes too long to collect. When it started to explore the whole new notion of desktop computing, IBM never imagined what would be unleashed when it approached a start up called Microsoft to provide them with an operating system. Me? I'm going walkabout. John Griffiths is a communications planner at CDP. Going freelance in September! (c) Account Planning Group 1995-2002
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