A less hectic week than last week, thankfully.

I had a great call with a travel business about refining their brand strategy and helping to carry it through to creative execution. Travel isn’t a new category for me, but it’s not something that forms the bulk of my work and so it feels like a fun change. Hopefully it’ll go ahead.

In debriefing last week’s away day, plans inevitably turned to the next quarter. The client’s financial year is the calendar year, and so the transition from quarter three into quarter four is a nice point to start thinking ahead to the next year, combining a quarterly planning day with an annual one.

Annual planning is, I think, a much harder thing to get right than quarterly planning, and harder even than setting a longer-term three- or five-year plan. What will happen in the next quarter is to a large extent knowable given a good understanding of what’s happening now; planning for three or five years out can be forgiven for spending more time in the realm of ambition than reality.

But a year is an uncomfortable amount of time. Treat it like a quarter, and set fairly certain goals, and you’ll get a nasty surprise when the year doesn’t turn out how you expected. Treat it as something unknowable, rather than merely unknown, and you run the risk of drift, and of failing to get the organisation focused on what’s important.

The knack will be to balance those two things: to create a plan that’s flexible enough to change and that has uncertainty built into it, but that focuses the whole team on the right things, the big things that we’ll need to work together to achieve.

I did my first sampling for Honest Umami last week, at Eat17 in Walthamstow (aka “North London’s poshest Spar”). It was great fun, albeit exhausting, standing outside in the sun for four hours chatting to anyone who’d listen about the wonders of MSG.

With a product like ours, which relies on challenging misconceptions, there’s nothing quite like this for figuring out which lines of attack land and which don’t, for sussing out what people already think, and for getting a feel for what makes someone a lost cause. I was pleasantly surprised at how receptive people were, albeit acknowledging that Walthamstow is Walthamstow. It’s also gratifying to see people love the product!