Monday, January 28, 2013

Plannerama

In one of those odd occasions where you think of a name for something that doesn't exist, and the name drives you to fit something around it... I was thinking about Plannerama recently.

Tell me if this sounds rubbish but:

Planners are generally intelligent people (the ones I know certainly are anyway), and we are always coming up with interesting ideas and observations for clients. So what if we used our plannery skills to do some good for the world?

So the first draft concept for Plannerama is this.

Twenty planners in an informal room, maybe a pub. We are split into four groups of 5 planners, split roughly by seniority.

Each groups is given twenty minutes to discuss and think of ideas around a topic of social, charitable or political importance. After the twenty minutes the topics are rotated, so each group has done all four topics by the end of the night.

There is then a twenty minute all group discussion on each topic, and the best three or four ideas are written down. Following the session the results are published, and hopefully at least one of them will be good enough to provoke some response, action or publicity around the topic in question.

Example ideas for topics:

Is there a peaceful way to resolve the Israeli/Palestinian conflict?
How do we best help the homeless in our cities?
How do we get the public to look at the facts around a political subject (E.g.: The EU) instead of the media hype?

Any thoughts?

8 comments:

Ant said...

Like the pun (!) and the idea.
Would be interested in helping out.
Ant

Rob Mortimer (aka Famous Rob) said...

Thanks!
If there is much interest I'll post about it here and give you a shout. Cheers!

Carol L. Weinfeld said...

Great idea.

Rob Mortimer (aka Famous Rob) said...

Thanks Carol :)

Anonymous said...

Planning For Good tried this years ago.

Not saying it won't be a fun evening, but planners won't change the world.

Rob Mortimer (aka Famous Rob) said...

Well, I don't expect that we would drastically change the world, but at least if it gets some people talking about an issue it can't hurt.

Besides, we'll never change it without trying :)

Claire C said...

I bet if you got in touch with some small local charities they would bite your hand off for the chance to get some time from a bunch of planners with a heart.

Working in third sector there's often a real shortage of strategic thinking - small charities especially. You could make a really big difference with a very small group of people...

Rob Mortimer (aka Famous Rob) said...

Hi Claire, that could be a very interesting way of utilising something similar. Thanks :)

Also, love the hat.