Digital Planning Checklists
- Be good at cutting and pasting
- Be able to deconstruct the craft
- Be able to expand (and contract) to fill the space available
- Be a good, and patient, educator
- Be cyber-optimist and a hyper-cynic
- Use the forces of geekdom
- Don’t hate business, it’s your friend
- Do things, make stuff
- Be Non-Stick and Wipe-Kleen
- Love what you do
Here’s my crack:
Be humble.
Good on you if you are omniscient- well done. For the rest of us mere mortals the more you learn the more you realise that digital is an ever expanding medium, and you just can’t keep up with it all. Once you get on top of this fact , you might realise that you’re not alone- we’re all stupid when it comes to the internet.
Ask lots of questions
Lots. Ask your clients. Creatives. The HTML team. Your peers. Your neighbour’s kids. Everyone has a piece of the puzzle.
Really understand that you are not your audience.
No, you are not a single mum with two kids, a Grey Nomad sea-changer and a time poor operations manager on the lookout for enterprise solutions. Ask: ‘what, specifically, do different people do?. What do they get out of their digital experiences?” How could you make that experience better?
Be a slut for information.
Read. Read. Read. Read. Read. Go to as many industry events as you can. Join a coffee morning, or start one of your own.
Share.
Be concise. Be expansive.
Be able to tell the same story in 30 seconds, 3 minutes and half an hour. Without notes.
Be inquisitive.
Have random adventures. Tyre-click. Enlist. Join communities. Contribute. Play all kinds of games. Ask yourself: “What’s this all about?”
Make maps
How can you describe regular daily digital journeys? How about a tribe’s ecosystem? How about how a joke spreads across a tight knit group of friends as they sit at their desks? Or how a mortgage or a dining chair or a holiday is purchased? What’s value exchange- how is it created? Practice visual thinking.
Be kind.
People don’t know what you know, and punching them in the face won’t get them on your side. Give back. Mentor. I often don’t really know what I think about something until I try and explain it to someone else. Accept all offers to teach. It’s terrifying- but it’s better for you to be terrified than have others too scared to approach you. Then your ideas go nowhere.
Have vision.
Make predictions. Call trends. Extrapolate. Put a stake in the ground, a line in the sand. Shift it often. What are the differences between probable, possible and preferable futures? How are they different? Have a position: what does it takes to make stuff great.
