Life is what happens while you’re busy making other plans

Opinion

The IPA’s senior insight analyst, Molly Bruce, stands in for Simon Frazier’s regular column again for this month to explore the importance of flexibility in a world where things rarely go to plan.

In the 2011 romcom Just Go With It, starring the iconic Jennifer Aniston, Jennifer’s fictional son Michael says that when he’s older, he wants to be just like their mailman. Thought not the usual answer of an astronaut, doctor or rockstar, Michael is thinking bigger. He wants to be like their mailman because “he just seems to have it all figured out”.

Even if you’re not a huge fan of the film, Michael’s words capture the innate appeal of a plan, of foresight and of predictability. Like Michael, wouldn’t we all like to have everything figured out? To banish the fear of uncertainty, that stomach-lurch we feel when we take a big risk?

But often life gets in the way

To quote the equally wise, though arguably more famous, Scottish poet Robert Burns, even

The best laid schemes o’ Mice an’ Men

Gang aft agley (often go awry)

In other words (mine this time), you can start something with the best of intentions and the most detailed plan in the world, but chances are, at some point, not everything will go as you once expected.

It’s often quoted as a 5 Ps mantra for life: Perfect Planning Prevents Pathetic Performance. And while this may work in a controlled environment where the volatility of every variable can be measured and the outcome predicted, the reality is, that while that’s a nice way of thinking in theory, the world just doesn’t work like that.

When the breadcrumbs blow away

Within the professional setting, the importance of agility cannot be understated and it’s something that we experienced first-hand when originally launching the publication, Making Sense: The Commercial Media Landscape, powered by IPA TouchPoints data.

Writing the first edition back in 2019, the path ahead seemed clear: analyse share of media by time, reach and device usage across age categories, and divide it by buyable media types. Though not exactly a piece of cake, it seemed that the breadcrumbs were laid and it was simply a case of following them to the gingerbread house.

But just as Hansel and Gretel’s route was pecked away by hungry birds, so too was our path muddied. Breaking down the media landscape into its constituent parts exposed a challenge when trying to analyse all media on a level playing field; due to methodological constraints, the way in which OOH media was analysed in the first edition was slightly at odds with industry planning norms.

Collaboration is King, Queen and the whole Royal Household

With the help of the OOH industry and many other amazing contributors, the report’s ingredients were reconsidered and recalibrated, and from the second edition onwards, we’d cracked the recipe.

With the eighth edition being launched at the annual IPA Planning and Strategy Summit in September of this year, it may look a little different to the original plan. However, with a dollop of flexibility, a drizzle of adaptability, and thanks to a generous sprinkle of industry collaboration it’s all the richer (I know I’ve overcooked it with the baking analogies), and we think that we’ve never been in a stronger position to help the industry navigate the ever-changing landscape. We continue to be in awe of the ways people across the industry use it to assist with brilliant planning and strategy projects.

Saying Yes to the Unthinkable

More recently, the IPA has brought these strands of work together to create the Making Sense Unit. This encompasses our IPA Making Sense podcast, The Planning and Strategy Summit, the Insight Summit, and the Making Sense – The commercial media landscape publication.

Drawing from Raja Rajamannar, chief marketing and communications officer at Mastercard, and his talk “Why Saying Yes to the Unthinkable Works“, we felt we needed to avoid the “comfort trap” – instinctively repeating what’s worked before, despite huge industry change.

Rajamannar argues that it’s only by embracing strategies that initially feel uncomfortable that we can stand out and escape what he calls the “sea of sameness” threatening to sink marketing. Decisions that don’t make sense in the short term can drive the greatest results in the long term.

For us, that meant moving away from the original plan and taking a risk to keep the industry offering relevant.

Meeting people where they are

That same willingness to adapt matters just as much in leadership. As Monica Majumdar, director of client strategy at Reach mentioned on the latest episode of the IPA Making Sense podcast:

This is the first time in the workplace that we have five generations in the office together … [all with] different perspectives, because each generation has been shaped by different events, different environments, and different technology. So, everyone has their own different expectations about what they need from leadership or how to be managed or how they want to progress. My main takeaway is stop making leadership about you or managing about you. It’s about getting the best out of the person.

As Monica highlights, effective leadership increasingly depends on meeting people where they are. Rather than expecting everyone to work in the same way, the best leaders focus on understanding what individuals need to perform at their best, be that being flexible with working from home, considering different forms of work socials, or in her case, accommodating the night-owl.

As she put it, managing isn’t about recreating your own experience or preferences in others; it’s about listening, adapting and creating the conditions for different people to thrive.

Tear up the blueprint, on purpose

When you were asked as a child what you wanted to be when you grow up, be that astronaut, doctor or rockstar, chances are your life now looks very different from the answer you gave. And there can be a lot of beauty in having no idea what life’s going to throw at you next, embracing new challenges and being able to flex and bend with changing circumstances.

Since things rarely go as planned, the ability to change course is key to remaining resilient during challenging times. The great Jenny Biggam is famous for re-writing the7stars’ business plan every year to stay relevant in a world where if you do what you’ve always done, you rarely get what you’ve always got.

So, on reflection, perhaps the biggest superpower of all isn’t rigidly following a strategy directly to its conclusion, but having the willingness to bake in adaptability from the start and then to just go with it.

Simon Frazier is the associate director and head of marketing, data innovation and The Making Sense unit at The IPA. His monthly column for The Media Leader will return in August.