This is a follow-up to my post a couple of weeks ago about community goal-setting (what should I make of the fact that the post with “ice cream” in the title got more hits than the one about sustainability?).
I am currently listening to my 12-year-old son practice the trumpet downstairs. He’s only been playing for 6 months, so good notes with clear tone are occasionally interspersed with something that sounds like a sick goose. For example, I think he just played the theme from the New World Symphony, but there was about 15 seconds of non-musical honking in the middle as he hit a tough spot. The cool thing as a parent is that, despite the occasional non-musical sounds, I can tell that he is getting better week to week. He is a long way from Carnegie Hall, but he’s improving.
In that blog post I laid out my perspective on how public participation should be done, but I admitted that I struggle with the idea of whether truly honest, inclusive goal-setting processes were reasonable to expect in the real world life of planning and economic development. In most of our communities, we simply don’t have much experience. Much our experience with planning and community goal-setting has not been ideal – either the opportunities for public participation have been limited, or participants have tried to out-shout each other, or solutions were over-simplified or not sufficiently tied to the hard work of making it happen. Or it was simply a matter of going through the motions.
Frankly, those of us that work with communities on a professional or leadership basis know too many situations where things have gone wrong. Why risk a transparent and deeply collaborative process when there are so many ways it can blow up in our faces?
Perhaps what we are really doing is assuming that our communities should be ready to play Rachmaninoff, instead of accepting that we might still be taking our lessons out of Learn to Work Together, Book 1. After all, we are mostly mature adults, not 12-year-old kids who just got handed the instruments, right?
In our guts, though, we know that our communities aren’t ready to perform at that high level. We have too much distrust, too much resistance to change, too many impediments to making the hard decisions and taking control of our future. So we limit our public participation to the bare minimum we can get away with, we produce plans with a lot of vague talk and no connection to action, we go through the motions and let everything stay the same instead of using the planning opportunity to make the changes that we know need to be made. Whether it’s a comprehensive plan or an economic development strategy or any other variation on the theme, the result is the same. We are fundamentally in the same mess we were before.
The fact of the matter is, although we as communities were handed the instruments of good planning a long time ago, we haven’t been practicing. We often haven’t built up the experience in working together that would be necessary to make proactive, strategic decisions about the future of the community, to allow us to be able to set course proactively and make good decisions when we need it.
But as global and regional competition increases, we find that we start trailing behind if our community is still focused on infighting or chasing the wrong solutions. We know that, if our community is to thrive, we need to be able to play at a higher level, but we haven’t yet developed the skills within our community and community leadership to do that.
Instead of assuming that we should be able to play the concerto today, maybe we need to regard our communities as learners. Maybe we need to expect that we will have honks and blatts along the way, and that sometimes our results will only bear a passing resemblance to the song we were trying to play. From my perspective, that would be OK, as long as we can admit that we are growing and changing and work on getting better. That would be, of course, a sea change in our civic lives: instead of being focused on accusations and rejecting less-than-perfect efforts, we would have to accept good intentions and imperfect delivery, with the patient realization that we as communities are learning to do it a little better every time. And by “we as communities,” I don’t just mean local government staff and leadership. I mean the residents, too.
Tall order, I know. But I have seen communities do it.
I would propose that the best way to tackle this issue might be to take a page from the folks who design web software: Get something going, get it out there, crowdsource feedback, improve product, repeat ad infinitum. Communities that need and want to learn to proactively address their futures, and do not have a successful track record in effective public engagement, often have more real success focusing on smaller areas and concrete projects, such as public site designs, downtown revitalization planning, neighborhood strategic planning, etc. The One Big Plan vs. Lots of Little Plans debate has been going on in both planning and economic development circles for generations, but for communities struggling to build a constructive community discourse, a Lots of Little Plans strategy has some significant advantages. In most cases, the stakes in a smaller-focus plan will be a little lower, so flubs along the way are more likely to go unnoticed by the larger public while they are being remedied. Second, a tighter focus should make it easier for the public participants to come to a mutual understanding about the issues that they need to address (a city is a largely abstract concept to most residents, but a neighborhood isn’t). And that mutual understanding of the different points of view relating to a place is absolutely critical to setting sound goals and making sound decisions. Best of all, a successful small-area planning process should create a new asset for the community: a body of persons who understand the importance of working together collaboratively, and have the experience and skills needed to do that. Drawn into larger planning contexts, those people will be like yeast in bread dough: they can help transform that planning by changing those conversations as well.
One final caution: My son has gotten as far as he has with the trumpet because he has a teacher who is teaching him how to play. Without that — if we had just handed him the instrument and said “here, figure it out,” he probably wouldn’t get much beyond the sick goose phase. Maybe he would have turned out to be some prodigy and figured out how to play the Haydn Trumpet Concerto on his own…. but I think the more likely result is that he would have honked for a few weeks and then quit.
If we are serious about building the capacity in our communities to plan the way we need to plan, we can’t just turn our citizens loose in a town hall meeting or an economic development strategy session and hope they figure it out. If we want those results — if we want proactive, intelligent planning with community support, whatever the flavor, it falls to the professionals and leaders to find good teachers. There are excellent methods for channelling and focusing citizens and creating opportunities for them to honestly explore their opportunities, but our communities need to be taught how.
We can do it, but if we aren’t taught and we don’t practice, we won’t get it done.
Your post took me back to my days at Bethel Township. While I was only there for three years, I like to think that the community “grew up” quite a bit in that short period of time. When I first began there, it was quite evident that that was a lot of thinking putting carts before horses; in other words, there were “tactics” but no well thought out “strategies”.
Our first order of business for myself and the Trustees was to come up with a strategic plan on what we wanted to become and how we were going to get there; that was a tough process. And it seemed like the first year of that plan all we did was slog through meetings and planning sessions, etc. I vividly remember one of the trustees stating, “This isn’t what I signed up for.” Well, it was exactly what was needed. We needed to think broader, develop deliverables and demonstrate to the public that we were advancing. Even though it was slow.
Comment by William Lutz — January 24, 2011 @ 1:40 pm
Cool, Bill!!! That’s a perfect example.
Comment by dellarucker — January 24, 2011 @ 2:15 pm
on a subject of creating wiser economy we should acknowledge three things: a , b and c.
a – every economy that ignores segments of a whole society is not a mature one /
b – every system that ignores problem of not participating in it by half of the population is not a mature one /
c – just like concept of roads built for everything that moves on it, there is need for a legislative structure, equally accessible to every voter to express approval of disapproval of it ( http://www.publicdom.net )
Comment by ed — January 24, 2011 @ 2:23 pm
Well said, Ed. I have often wondered what it is as people that makes it so hard for us to handle complex systems and so easy for us to solve that problem by ignoring pieces of it. It is as though we cope with the inherent complexity of societies by putting on blinders.
Comment by dellarucker — January 26, 2011 @ 10:21 am
Great stuff, Della! I’m working on my third book now, and there’s a passage in this piece I might like to quote to support a point I’m making about the importance of a programmatic approach to revitalization, rather than the reactive, sporadic, project-by-project approach. Cheers! – Storm
Comment by Storm Cunningham — January 24, 2011 @ 4:07 pm
Fantastic, Storm! Sounds like a valuable read. Let me know if I can do anything else to help.
Comment by dellarucker — January 26, 2011 @ 10:18 am
… along with the most important rule of all … you can only help those willing to help themselves!!
Comment by Jennifer Brooks — January 25, 2011 @ 12:35 pm
Yep, that’s the tricky part, especially since those who aren’t willing to help themselves often have the potential to derail forward momentum. How do you convince or cajole people who areworking from a particular self-interest to see the bigger picture and their enlightened self interest?
Or does the way I put that betray our own weakness — do we tend to focus on convincing them, rather than including or incorporating them?
Comment by dellarucker — January 26, 2011 @ 10:17 am
Wow, thanks Della. I’ve been attending MMS associate level seminars about the Michigan Main Street system and in visiting MMS communities, it has been frustrating to gleen out the steps to get to the “concerto” level. I think what you are saying is to “practice” by engaging some stakeholders on small projects and building those relationships. Then you have a base (“yeast”) to expand into the process of developing a sustainable plan for growth which would involve a much broader community base which seems to be the marker for a successful community. And definitely get professional help along the way.
Comment by Mike Lee — January 25, 2011 @ 5:05 pm
Thanks for translating, Mike!
Comment by dellarucker — January 26, 2011 @ 10:10 am
One often overlooked way to help communities ‘learn’ to be better planners is through pro-active collaboration with university urban planning programs. As an environmental planning professor at California State Polytechnic University/Pomona, I create each class to be a design studio with a ‘real world’ client, including such agencies as the US Forest Service, the Youngstown Ohio Neighborhood Development Corporation and the Community Redevelopment Agency/Los Angeles. Through these projects, the best practices I’ve been teaching my graduate planning students gets germinated with local, state and federal agencies as well as with key stakeholders in a safe community-inspired context. The best part is that the final deliverable is given FREE to the client, so they have a tangible product for future modelling. My students, in turn, gain real world experience and a conceptual design plan for their job-hunting portfolio. The players don’t feel threatened by the students and the students ‘teach’ the players how to look at a footprint, a neighborhood, or a river corridor with fresh eyes. Check out my blog, http://www.arroyolover.com, for some examples of our class work and outreach.
Comment by Meredith McKenzie — January 26, 2011 @ 2:28 am
Meredith, I really appreciate your comments, and I do not know your work, but I feel like I need to play devil’s advocate here. I have dealt with a number of faculty-led, student- delivered planning projects, both as an advisor and as a professional working with communities that have previously had such projects.
Based on what I have seen, I think that planning professors who are leading projects to help students apply the skills that they have been taught to community needs face some significant challenges — I am speaking broadly, not about any particular situation. First, there appears to be a tendency to apply best practices or ideal solutions regardless of whether or not the community has the political, social and/or economic capacity to carry out the plan. The students are often enamored with the big ideas and the best practices, and the professors understand that their primary purpose is to teach the students to apply those ideas, but in the process it is very easy for the students and professor to overlook the real-world issues that will impact whether the planned project materializes the way it was intended or does what it was intended to do. This seems to be particularly a problem with design-oriented plans, which can easily become disconnected from the economic, social and political context. I am convinced that planning that doesn’t fully deal with and anticipate the economic, political and social factors that will impact a plan can easily become more of a detriment to the community than a help. Best case scenario is that the community cannot figure out how to get it done, worst case scenario is a large, expensive burden for generations. I have a blog post coming out later this week about this issue. But my point is that anticipating and managing that complex range of factors and impacts is a lot to ask of students, even bright and talented students. This is why we value experience in this profession.
Best practices are important, but our communities are running out of margin of error. We have too many messes to clean up from the past, and too many demands on our funds. Plans need to be targeted, very implementation-oriented, very conscious of the real world and very strategic, and I have not seen a student project successfully pull that off. Pretty plans that can’t be built, or backfire, are one of the key reasons why planning has a credibility issue today.
I do think that students and faculty can contribute enormously to making plans better — the flip side of the challenge I have outlined above is that consulting professionals sometimes struggle to push the envelope as much as a community might need, both because of self-interest and because they may not have had time to learn all the latest best practices.
My preference would be for more projects that directly combine faculty, students and consulting professionals. That would greatly advance the profession by pulling up the quality, comprehensiveness and effectiveness of plans, and it would benefit communities by giving them a blend of best practices and real-world contextual experience. The consultants have to feed themselves, so that would require some fee, but in most cases, even today, communities can find a funding source if they really need it — and the combination of professional and nonprofit assistance can open doors to funding sources that they couldn’t tap to simply hire a for-profit consultant.
Comment by dellarucker — January 26, 2011 @ 10:49 am