Sunday, November 21, 2010

Shit Hitting Fan - My Thoughts

The past few days have been completely bizarre in the world of planning. A series of allegations and stories have emerged that have created a storm in the plannersphere, and in particular, have led to lots of calls for one particular person to be punished and turned into some kind of lynching figure.

I'll make it clear that I only slightly know both main parties, and I don't know which allegations are true and which are not.

The problem I have is that in a scenario like this it is impossible to know what are the truths and what are lies. Clearly the person in question has done a number of things that he should not be proud of, and possibly some that he could get into serious trouble for.

However, we must be wary of creating a mob attitude until we know the full truth. We don't know the reasons, the coincidences, the personal opinions and vendettas that could change things for each side of the argument.

He may very well be guilty of all of these things, but he equally could be innocent of many of them. I just hope we can all be as understanding and considered about this as we would be if it were a piece of insight or information that we were using for a client. We would* never try and sell in baseless conclusions to clients, let's not do the same here. Let the people with the evidence and the people with the talking to do solve this, and we can all discuss it then.

The last thing we need is for mud slinging, in-fighting, side taking and bitching to take this difficult situation and create a long term problem between people in our field.

*I hope!

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Personally, I think the (more and more common) 'lynching' reference is a little strong. A few people have definitely been screwed over (fact, not theory) by Sam and someone has taken the time to warn the rest of the industry. She's worked up, yes, but perhaps fairly so. There have been numerous invitations for him to come forward and explain himself and he hasn't, yet he's taken the time to write a (typical) blog post about fresh beginnings, which really does nothing to clear his name or make amends if need be. Comments on blogs can always be somewhat 'nasty' but what Heather has done is brave and shouldn't result in lynching references which are just as incorrect and unhelpful as actual lynching would be.

Rob Mortimer (aka Famous Rob) said...

When I talk about lynching that is more around the follow up comments than it is what Heather has said or done.

Heather has been brave, I respect her openness and determination, I'm just wary that should half of this turn out not to be true it will affect both her and sam more than it needed to. The shouting and accusations other people bring in to follow that aren't so well researched are where it starts to get damgerous.