The Future of Planning Is… staying connected to real people

It’s impossible not to be excited about what AI is opening up for us as strategists.

Suddenly, the boundaries of our job feel different.

I can move quicker, cut through complexity, and stitch together disparate data sets at lightning speed. I can preload my processes into workflows, throw in a few provocations, and watch my computer spit something out that would have taken me days in the past.

It makes me feel smarter, more efficient, more able to keep pace with an industry that is only speeding up, as clients constantly demand more for less.

But it also makes me uneasy.

Because those same demands, made possible by these brilliant new tools, risk pushing us further away from the people we’re actually supposed to be talking to. That tired cliché of the “ivory tower” the industry is so often accused of inhabiting could quickly become reality. 

Of course, I know techniques like qual research and ethnography are expensive, time-consuming, and far from perfect. As David Ogilvy famously complained about market research: “people don’t always think what they feel, say what they think, or do what they say.”

So why should we put our ideas in the hands of the public?

Because here’s the thing: creativity has never been about statistical significance or a “right answer”. Creativity comes from the magic that lives in the messiness of real people’s lives.

There’s gold in the throwaway turns of phrase. In the contradictions. In the illogical leaps the human mind makes in conversation. These are leaps no algorithm would ever deem “significant” - but which have the power to light up my creative imagination and spark big ideas.

This was crystallised for me when I was lucky enough to spend time in Nairobi and Lagos, helping to run research for one of our global clients. Being with the young people there was hugely inspiring, but also an important reminder that no amount of desk research could replace the richness of what I was discovering face to face. The way they talked about their hopes over a beer. The rhythm in their language. The confidence in their gestures. The humour tucked into an offhand story. This is the beautifully rich texture that fuels good strategy, and it only comes from being face to face.

It’s this humanity that pulls us apart from management consultancies and automated tech platforms, both of whom are very good at reducing behaviour into neat dashboards.

If we’re to position ourselves for the future I believe our job mustn’t flatten humanity into trends. We maintain our relevance as strategists by taking life’s rough edges and helping to nurture them into big creative ideas real people can fall in love with.

This doesn’t mean I’m against AI. Far from it. I remain excited about what it can do.

But it’s a tool - not a substitute.

And as we’re constantly pushed to do more, faster, we should never let the ease and efficiency of using it make us forget where great strategy really comes from. Not a workflow, not a deck, but in the streets, homes and lives of the real people we’re trying to move.

Because if strategy loses its grounding in real people, then who exactly are we making ideas for?