Sharyon Sutton on "Seizing Unforeseen Opportunities"

Two things that I learned when I had the opportunity to run some major campaigns for the government was one, research and planning was the wrong way to go. It should be planning and research because I myself as a research person I’m going to say it was my first week in government but probably I wasn’t that quick, but I could go in the morning and design a perfectly good survey on the research side and then in the afternoon realize I had designed research that would help nobody run this campaign and that was when like a light bulb went off in my head. I could always come up with research questions, but those weren’t the questions I needed to answer. They really were the campaign questions and so we turned it around and said we’re always, we’re going to sit down and pretend that we have to plan and design this campaign now, with no information, what don’t we know? And then using that, those were the questions that we then took to research and that made a huge difference because you can only do so much planning until you hit the real world. And so if our planning was more iterative, we’d plan and see what works and then change it and not spend a lot of time creating the perfect plan, all the way down to implementation.

So we try to stop our plans now at major strategies and the trick is you put your thumb over your name or your issue and then read the strategy and if it doesn’t matter that it’s you, then it may not be a good strategy. So you want strategies that are really focused on your issues that make a difference. If you’ve got those strategies then the whole point is to wait for the opportunities. You can plan things but you want those opportunities that come along. So for example, on mammography campaign for NCI, we had no idea that NBC was going to come in and offer to produce television shows. We had no idea that Avon wanted to become engaged in the local effort. We had no idea that Revlon wanted to work with the YWCA to get mini-grants out to local community groups, but because we had our strategies in place, when those opportunities came, you know, you say, throw it up against the wall, if it sticks, do it. We should be doing more of that, so I’m not saying you do any opportunity that comes along, but if you’ve got the right strategies you’re waiting for those opportunities. Some come, some go, but it is the opportunities you want to be able to leverage so we don’t need to plan down to “what are we going to do on this month?” We need to know, these are our core strategies and now where are the opportunities that we can implement them.