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Over most part of the last ten years I have been fortunate to be part of a really unique social network. It’s a mailing list, simply known as The Hivemind. It’s a hundred or so really interesting people who spend quite a lot of time bickering, talking and exchanging daily inane chit-chat that can quickly escalate into the most profound insights I have ever heard. The collective hivemind knows everything.  From shower door repairs to a 2nd medical opinion.

I got into it when one day an ex-colleague said: “You can talk an inordinate amount of bullshit. I’ve heard of a mailing list for people like you.” That was then, this is now and I am still amazed that there any many, many people who can talk more crap than me.

Of the list members, I have only met a handful in real life. But I know most quite well.

The Future Foundation, which started the list, is still running this community as a service, free of charge, for which all of us are greatly indebted.

The Hivemind does not rely on fancy techno wizardry to operate. It’s a bog standard mailing list and has had domains in most social networks – such as Facebook (look under gardening) – but has always remained primarily a mailing list.

Today, it celebrates its 10th Birthday. Happy Birthday, Hivemind.

The ad industry has always been a business of two man (read person) relationships. Famours pairs of minds, one with the business acumen, the other the maverick creative genius. Or the famed copywriter/art director who just can’t stop collecting gold door stoppers for their agencies.

They are the pairs media hacks love to call Dynamic Duos.

The Way Things Are Going™, account planning is really boiling to the top as the new sex of the idea industry. Believe it or not, planning is the new sex.

Perhaps it is because planners are more adept at using social media. Maybe in the world where the power is shifting to the hands of the user, he who hath the insight is king. But I think mostly, the work that planners do has become interesting and sexy as technology allows them to roll up their own creative sleeves and represent their work and insights in more interesting ways.

At the same time, the creative future lies with those creatives who don’t think of themselves as art directors or copywriters – but as ideas people. Creative connectors who are passionate about the disciplines of film, design and writing and who know how to connect and collaborate with the best in order to create something remarkable.

So the next logical step for the agency who wants to succeed in the new game, is to haul out their most innovative planners and put them in the same offices as those creative people who defy the titles of the previous century. Let them work in briefs together – in teams of two. Let them find new ways of talking to those their ideas are going to interact with. Let them define the challenge together. And most importantly, let them crack and develop the ideas together.

The players who don’t get this, will soon find themselves without a game.

Toddled off to go see the Chanel Mobile Art Exhibition today in Hong Kong – the city where it opened. (It is set to go from here to Tokyo, New York, London, Moscow and Paris.)

It is a 700m² 70 piece container, designed by in-vogue architect Zaha Hadid. Visitors are guided, one by one through the exhibition with a Madamoiselle Chanel-esque voice-over and soundtrack as guide, played on an MP3-player.

I entered the space with zero expectations. The container itself is pretty impressive from the outside. The flow of human traffic through the space is very efficient and so the experience is rather painless.

It is interesting how the experience of donning headphones and suddenly being instructed by a voice shifts you from the everyday to the here and now. This is a useful thing for creative people to understand. The disruption grabs the attention of the viewer.

My worries started when I entered the first room where Madamoiselle Chanel told me to behold the visual illusions around me. Basically, she was referring to two big clusters of platic see-through prisms and a mosaic-tile floor. I had to behold this space for quite a few minutes before I was told by the Madamoiselle that it was cool to move on.

What followed were some average exhibition displays, ranging from projections in boxes of naked ladies beating each other with handbags to a mirror-display of a series of buildings, with opening and closing windows.The strangest part of the exhibition happened when I entered a space with two stuffed pigs, with tattoos on their skins -  alongside, two handbags made of the raw pig-skin, adorned with the same tattoos. If anything has ever put you off the idea of buying leather products, this was it.

There was something clever about the metaphor of a bag, at the end, where the madamoiselle told you to get your restrictions out of the bag, but the prevaling thought I had as I emerged – was one of disgust.I will never think of the Chanel brand in the same way. Where the container hinted at a brand of innovation, the exhibition was one of over-indulgence and design without strategy.

At first I thought this exhibition was a really clever way of announcing that Chanel was switching to all-synthetic manufacturing. But alas, it was idea over execution. Form without function. In all, a grossly disappointing experience.

In a bid to understand my own sense of aesthetics, I had a glance at my favourite images from Flickr. Images I have favourited over the last few months. This collection above is the most recent.

Perhaps there is a similiarity in colour tones; simplicity in composition.

In the end they all have one thing in common: they evoke in me an envy that I did not press the shutter.

Whereas most creative professions benefit from collaboration, it seems that writing doesn’t. Except when the writer receives guidance from an editor or more experienced writer of course. But when you ask people to contribute to a story, and nobody knows where it goes, it gets messy quickly.

I started a “Just Three Words” story on Facebook. J3W is a Facebook app that enables users to contribute to a story by adding three words at a time. Over 15 different people contributed over a couple of weeks, and this is sometimes funny, but mostly garbled result:

Free words they were however, expensive, and rightly so given the huge budget the client had allocated to the strippers and vegetables. Of course, prenominal clauses weren’t a big issue but their incessant questions about the size of the bananas, cucumbers and melons had begun. That’s when Mr Know-it-All- really showed his rather enormous appetite for inflated gall bladders and peanut-butter toasted sandwiches.

A hasty decision was made by his assistant, who had huge melons hidden in her rather yummy looking credenza. Without hesitating, she bent over and undid the zipper on her suspiciously lumpy duffle, which at this age was rather, how you say- skanky-. Then I grabbed hold of the melons and, with gritted teeth handed them over to Mr Know-it-All.

For some reason He dropped them to his ankles without realizing the umbrella was tangled. Umbrella? What umbrella by another name would still deflect communist realities abroad? Asked rhetorically obviously.

Because we all appreciate the inherent absurdness of a agency client meeting without an umbrella.

But I digress. Monsoon season was not for kids.

Even umbrella-wielding kids. And most of these dangerous children were skillfull at constructing deadly origami umbrellas to settle demanding client’s needs. Of course, no one ever got attacked unless they looked really deserving.

One of them was opened indoors with disastrous results. But then again, one should know how, and when to wield a melon-reflecting, attack-type umbrella…

But I digress. Mr Know-it-All’s blunder was about to cause havoc within the sphere of the Agency reception. Unobserved by anyone, and without thought, he spanked that lady who brought the subject of eternal damnation to the attention of all necrophiliacs. Unbeknownst to us all the piglet said: “Don’t forget about the bacon and gall bladders when you open me with your blunt instruments. I shudder to think what could go to the expense account otherwise! We must pretend not to notice bra straps that peek out from strapless dresses. Or, indeed, umbrellas.”

Just another day in the quagmire of wanking alone and without lubrication.