As a planner how do you persuade clients to 'buy' your proposed strategy or idea?
Let me share with you the overlapping viewpoints of two well known planners:
#1 You can't bore people into buying an idea - you need to be interesting
#2 It's better to be interesting than it is to be right
Now let me add into the mix an extract from another well known planner, Malcolm White:
'...planning today is more about interesting ideas than it is about the right idea...[however] as Jeremy Bullmore put it: "we need to be intuitive, instinctive, scared and lucky AND we need to be rigorous, disciplined, logical and deductive".
...we need more of these sorts of people and less of those who are just interesting'
...we need more of these sorts of people and less of those who are just interesting'
Coming back to planner #1 and #2. It is absolutely right to 'be interesting ' in helping gain a clients attention and buy-in. However this mustn't be to the detriment of ensuring those ideas are also robustly developed. After all the best ideas are those that not only see the light of day, but that also deliver.
So as planners it is our duty to be compelling. In other words we need to provide both the sizzle AND the sausage.
