Author: John V Willshire

When you’re setting up an Actionplanning session, and you want to draw people away from their day-to-day thinking so the brainstorming is more productive, I’ve always found it helps if you have lots of interesting distractions from other places to show people.

So, for instance, I’ll point you now in the direction of the ongoing Generalist vs. Specialist debate.

Essentially, if you’re a ‘Generalist’, you have an understanding across many areas, picking up and fusing inspirations from these places to help frame a specific strategy or problem.  You’re ‘well-rounded’, you define the goal.

A ‘Specialist’ is someone who works exclusively in one area with advanced understanding and capabilities in that area, and delivers a solution to the goal.  You’re an expert, you solve the problem.

Anyway, this image from Dave Gray, of visual thinking company XPLANE, perfectly describes the issue (and I found it first on Mark McGuinness’s brilliant synopsis of the Generalist/Specialist debate)

Thinking about the two stages of Actionplanning, you are seeking to get people acting as both Generalists AND Specialists. 

So, for the divergent thinking section, when you want people to stretch their brains as far as possible to explore pioneering solutions, you want people to be Generalists… “tap into lots of potentially exciting, different areas, but not in great depth.”

Then, once you’ve identified the most fertile areas, you get people to start working up more thorough, descriptive, fleshed out versions of what the solutions would be; they’re being Specialists… “design a precise solution based on this defined territory”.

It naturally follows that if you need people to be Generalists and Specialists in Actionplanning sessions, the best sessions you run will have a mix of Generalists and Specialists from around your agency.  Just like the best parties, you’ve got to invite the right mix of different people…

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Here’s something I tried this morning for the first time when running an actionplanning session, which I’m going to dub ‘battle actionplanning’ for the immediate future.  Essentially, it’s a bit like this:

Remember “War Games” with Matthew Broderick?  No, OK – the plot was thus: in the early eighties, the US have a computer system which plays out ‘scenarios’ of nuclear war – who launches first, where they strike and so on – in order to perfect their defence systems.  Matthew Broderick, in best Bueller guise as anti-establishment kid, hacks the system, makes them think there’s a nuclear war on (by accident, of course, and bleak hilarity ensues…).

Anyway, the premise is essentially ‘take two teams, and have them ‘battle’ each other, striking and counter-striking, around a common theme’. 

Firstly, set up the scenario for them, and split them into two factions (a ‘pro’ and an ‘anti’, or two competitors, or whatever).

Then get them to go away, come up with ideas for five minutes, and come back and present those first ideas and positioning.

Then, once they’ve learned what the opposition is doing, get them to go away again, and come up with new ideas in light of the knowledge they just gained about the opposition.  Then they come back and present those, and you can repeat this as often as you like.

The result?  It worked pretty well for a first time, people got into it (the competitive element helps, I reckon), and it gave us lots of interesting areas to work up ideas around for a real campaign.  It’s also quite a high energy, and really rips people out of the ‘day-to-day’ and into the space you want them to be thinking in.  To be repeated, methinks…

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When you’re running an Actionplanning session, how much do you think about how you personally are in charge of the session?  You really can make the difference to the ideas that come out of the room by the way you behave.

Have a read of this article by Mitch Ditkoff at the Ideas Champions – it’ll make you think about how you behave as the facilitator in your Actionplanning sessions, not just what subject preparation you do.

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