How would you reinvent Planning?

Sarah Newman
Sep 18
7 min read

APG Noisy Thinking | September 2025

This is the essay question I set the Noisy Thinkers. I was intrigued to find out what they thought, as it’s essentially a start-again question and they had licence to do that by abolishing the way we work and rewriting the Planning handbook.

Reinvention, in my mind, is a wonderful skill: The ability to exercise the imagination in search of change so that something presents as entirely new. An ideal task for a Planner, you might say.

Of course any big question you ask Planners risks a tsunami of theory and philosophising, and whilst that has its place, I’m not really a fan of strategy opinion unmoored from the everyday of clients and brands.

I think we should leave that, and all the nonsense about Planning being dead, to the sad sacks on LinkedIn and try and change the tone.

Head and heart. And keep it real.

So there was just one guideline: Be practical. Give people something concrete to think about, take away and do the next day at work.

In 2023, the APG ran an update of our skills survey. We asked the Planning community in the UK and globally, what are the most important skills a Planner needs now? And we also asked them what was going to be most important in the future.

The top answer for both was understanding people. This was rated 9.45 out of 10 across the sample. The second most important skill was defining problems. I think this is a useful place to start because it reflects what I see as the twin, basic modes a Planner needs to bring to work - head and heart.

By ‘head’ I mean specific aspects of the job that you learn from APG courses and from your colleagues (loosely, perhaps the guidelines of brand planning). ‘Heart’ is the things you bring to your work as a person, encompassing your own experience of life, your interests and passions and above all, your empathy.

Tune out the noise, but tune into culture

According to our speakers, it’s still this killer combination of head and heart that makes a really good Planner or Strategist.

So, Planning doesn't need to be entirely reinvented.

But boy, are there things we could do better and differently, and there’s a lot that needs updating. Sometimes this means adhering more closely to the ‘eternal verities’ of the craft and not allowing every trend and tech advance to warp the way we work, and sometimes it’s about attuning ourselves much more sensitively and proactively to what is happening in culture.

The four speeches we heard were as individual and fascinating as the speakers, who were chosen to give a series of diverse perspectives

Enter Kit Altin, our Chair, Jim Carroll, our resident Planning Godfather, Imali Hettiarachchi, agency planner turned strat at Lego, Ashley Biack, the lone voice of youth on the panel and Ayo Fagbemi, the self-styled strategy risk taker.

They were terrific. Each had just 7 minutes to make their case, tell us what we should be doing better and give us an idea of how to do it.

A ‘serious job for unserious people’*

The background to all the talks was how we should react to change. AI was mentioned as an undercurrent, but not the main focus. Instead, we heard about how to double down on our humanity, how to respond to the messiness of the world, how important it is to take risks, and how being able to articulate a vibe is a superpower in the modern world of brands.

The notion of the polished, perfect Planner, the smartest person in the room, is a distraction. We need to lean into the messiness of life, hack into its energy, be flawed. A great strategy team is like a band. We should acknowledge that good stuff comes from the band, the team, and talking about the lows is as important as celebrating the highs.

We also learned how our planning skills can do more for our own sense of self-worth if only we apply them more thoughtfully both in and out of work. And we were told in no uncertain terms that the homogenisation of brands and advertising is a killer, and that it’s our job to seek out differentiation and keep looking forward

*Ayo’s brilliant summation, not mine

Finding the difference and trusting your feelings

Jim provided a succinct evaluation of the state of the industry, encompassing the major trends that have impacted Planning over his years in the business, the dilemmas these raised and their echoes today. He outlined how a high value, premium business expanded into a volume business and how planners became obsessed with new media platforms and came to believe the medium was the message.

He talked about ‘wind tunnel marketing’ and how this tendency to conformity is only strengthened by AI. How in the world of wind tunnel marketing, unless we are careful, best demonstrated practice will become conventional practice.

His prescription for planners is to focus on difference. When everything seems the same, a powerful articulation of difference can command a premium. Difference earns consumer attention, intimacy, and preference.

We need to intuit where the energy is in an idea and return to the core skills of compression and focus, balanced with the ability to imaginatively expand. And we must always look forward and focus on what is new and different, not other brands and categories.

The medium is not and never was the message. It remains our job to find the right message for the right audience.

Let imaginative empathy be your guide, and learn to trust your feelings.

The rare powers of Planners, and a Strategy as a lens, not a job

Imali’s talk expanded on this theme of humanity and the core superpowers of Planners. She chose to interpret the question on the level of an individual Planner’s experience - our values and our sense of self-worth, and where we should best use our planning skills.

Her experience moving from agencies to Lego had given her a new found wonder at the remarkable range of talent and skill that good strategists have. It’s an extraordinary combination and we should celebrate it:

We find the emotional story buried in the data
We spot patterns across different domains like media, tech, politics, and culture.
We chart paths from chaos to clarity.
We take a bird’s-eye view on what’s current and have a sense of what’s coming next.

Strategy is a lens, not a job.

We need to double down on our humanity and our human-first skills of playfulness, strategic clarity, reading a room and making fast decisions that are good decisions.

And there isn’t a problem on earth that wouldn’t benefit from our way of seeing.

She believes that reinvention is a mindset shift and we should be using these rare powers wisely, saying no to briefs that aren’t worth answering, and to businesses that just perform virtue. We need to properly take account of Effectiveness 2.0 that measures social and environmental impact alongside commercial profitability.

Imali would make that kind of holistic impact our gold standard. And with it, kill the idea that all briefs are worth answering.

‘Because when you know your worth, you don’t say yes to everything’.

Finding the vibe and making effort cool again

Ashley talked compellingly about how Planners are uniquely able to help modern brands find their ‘vibe’ with one word or a feeling that imbues everything they do. Brands are changing so fast with culture, with technology and with what people care about that it’s our job to focus on this.

Her killer insight is when everything already comes so easily to us, the things that are scarce

and memorable now are the moments that make people move, hunt, gather, and participate. She thinks planners need to help brands create and regulate tension and carve out the moments of friction that people seek in the sea of sameness. It pulls them in and gives them a reason to work a bit more - like a secret location and 99p in coins to buy a pair of Corteiz cargo pants worth £130.

She described how important it is to see modern brands as cultural chameleons that understand the marriage between culture, creators and social media:

A brand such as Loewe, that has mostly relied on traditional media, has figured out its identity on TikTok.
And rent focused payment service BILT, using episodic storytelling on TikTok to promote their service, having understood our binge-driven viewing habits.

So what do we do? See Planning as something living, breathing, and adaptable and be ready and comfortable to answer new questions in new ways. And we are the connection to this understanding. We are the mediators of the vibe.

Look for beauty in the mess and lean into risk

Ayo was the most radical of our speakers, happy to bust all the expectations of the Planner as Polished Professional, engage with the mess and the failures and above all, like Jim, be ready to take the risks that allow you and the way you think about brands to prioritise being different.

All the signals may be trending towards conformity, but Planners need to do things their own way and send new signals that favour personality over being ‘right’, being looser and vulnerable in the way we communicate. Don’t worry about spelling and grammar; letting go of the rules means that you can be faster and more alive to discussion. In a messy world, the real power is realness and a sense of raw energy and doing things in combination with other people.

The Planner as lone genius is the opposite of the contemporary way of being and working. Let’s ditch that and think about Brian Eno’s notion of ‘Scenius’, of creating a community around you, not ‘genius’. And let’s get louder, in volume and impact.

Be beacons for each other, and share the lows as well as the highs on LinkedIn.

On a practical level, make your strategy live in DMs and half formed thoughts. Be scrappy, put yourself forward.

Above all, be prepared to disrupt the process: Be different in your output and against the competition.

Nothing changes. Everything changes. And that’s as it should be.

What should we take from all of this? My first thought is about the stickiness of the ideas that were discussed and how much they got people talking. Almost everyone stayed for a drink and a chat, and they kept ON talking about what they’d heard and what they thought about it.

And they were going to use these ideas the next day at work.

BINGO!

I have to give it to the speakers. They were the opposite of a deadly LinkedIn post: extraordinarily interesting, brimming with ideas, and communicating a real enthusiasm for the future.

Each of them gave a vision for reinvention with lots of simple, practical and buzzy ideas for new ways of working.

And above all, they leaned into the things that make us really special: the intersection of feeling and understanding that makes Planners unique and our ability to imaginatively reinvent the discipline without losing our moorings.