Strategic planners, lateral thinking and stand up comedy

 Strategic planners have this innate habit and drive to connect seemingly unrelated dots and try to make sense of the world around them. No wonder that they immerse themselves into so many different kinds of things - and each will find its way into the work they do. Either it's in the brief, in the strategy deck, in the consumer insight, in the quest to simplify complicated thoughts and behaviours, anything.

It's almost as if this constant need to connect dots and look for patterns is our coping mechanism to find meaning in chaos. It helps us understand the world better.

And we do this so often that most often - it's on auto mode and spontaneous. 

While we do this daily with the knowledge we assimilate along the way, we rarely utilize it to generate newer ideas when required.


And then, I chanced upon a wonderful video by Mark Pollard, that showed me a new way to leverage this connection seeking behaviour of planners. It was used to showcase the power of lateral thinking, with some pretty neat examples. 


Ideas happen when there's a chaos, conflict. And when there's too much order, especially since a planner's head is seen as this organized, well knit brain that is designed to concoct well articulated and well thought through ideas - there's little room for chaos, and therefore little breeding ground for ideas.


This exercise by Mark is like a fission bomb inside our heads - that helps us create a controlled blast to activate our mind and create necessary chaos for ideas to seep through as a result.




Don't be fooled at this simplicity - it's always tough to implement it - especially when you need it the most.

And this ability to fuse 2 absolutely contradictory words and thoughts, to create an exciting idea is often seen in stand up too.

Much like Mark Pollard himself, I too am a fan of stand up and I truly believe that there's a lot a planner can learn from the art and the artists themselves.

A stand up artist has the innate quality of speaking about something very mundane and regular but looking at it from a completely different perspective.

The comic can take 2 complete opposite words and create an absurd, humourous, thought provoking or entertaining idea.

Most famous bits of comedians leverage this behaviour. Their premise is most often the first thought, their set up will be about a completely contradictory opinion or thought - and bam - the punchline is when you see how they have connected the 2, forming a completely new, unique opinion and idea.


And I have found a very neat piece of stand up to show this in action.

It's a bit by Matt Falk, performed at the Comedy Drybar. 

His bit starts off with his inclination and interest in birdwatching

His set up is about the only people who seem to be interested in that hobby.

The punchline is a beautiful surprise.




The ability to look at 2 contradictory perspectives and views or thoughts and combine them to create something totally new is something that comes quite easily with the creative folks.

But I truly believe that we need to make it more visible within strategy itself. For starters - there's nothing original in our strategy in any case. We are constantly trying to create a new path but it's not technically a new path - it's just a new one for the brand we are working with.

And the more we bring together opposing forces - the easier it will become for us to identify a bolder strategy for the brands we work for.

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