Stop Asking People to Think Like Planners

My hometown of Brainerd, Minnesota, recently sent out a survey asking residents about the future of our community.* I appreciate the effort. Cities should be asking questions. They should be listening. They should be trying to understand the people they serve.

But I did not even get past the first question:

"Support mixed-use development that is focused on integration instead of the separation of land uses."

I had to read it twice.

Not because I disagreed with it. In fact, I largely agree with the sentiment. Mixed-use development is often a good thing. The separation of land uses has created a lot of problems in American cities, mine near the top of the list. What struck me was something else.

Nobody talks like that.

My neighbors don't. The people I run into at church don't. The parents dropping their kids off at school don't. The survey wasn't asking residents to describe their lives. It was asking them to answer a planning question, one presented and framed in a way that will feel completely foreign to nearly all of them.

Years ago, Steve Jobs made an observation about focus groups that has become famous.

It's really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don't know what they want until you show it to them.

That statement is often misunderstood as an argument against listening to customers. It isn't. Apple listened obsessively to customers. What Jobs understood was that customers experience frustrations, desires, and obstacles. They do not necessarily experience solutions.

If Apple had surveyed people in the late 1990s, customers might have asked for a better Walkman. Longer battery life. More storage. Smaller CDs. Better headphones. Nobody would have asked for an iPod. Not because people lacked insight, but because they were describing their problems through the language of the existing system.

The same thing happens in city planning. Residents know where they struggle. They know which intersections feel dangerous. They know which streets their children are afraid to cross. They know whether housing feels attainable. They know whether a neighborhood feels welcoming.

What they often don't know — and shouldn't be expected to know — is whether the answer involves mixed-use zoning, form-based codes, parking reform, traffic calming, tax increment financing, or some other technical intervention.

Those are planning tools. Residents are experts in something much more important: their own experience.

A recent article from the American Planning Association discusses innovative public engagement techniques. The article correctly identifies a real problem. Traditional public meetings often don't work very well. Dot-voting exercises become predictable. SWOT analyses are tedious. Attendance is low. Participants are frequently unrepresentative.

The planners featured in the article have responded with creativity. Some use restaurant menus to help residents prioritize projects. Others use shopping experiences, games, and visual exercises to make participation more engaging.

I admire the effort, but I couldn't shake the feeling that these innovations mostly improve how we collect answers without questioning whether we're asking the right questions in the first place.

The problem isn't the dots. The problem is believing we already know what questions matter.

Years ago, I participated in a public engagement session with a group of young people. The conversation started in the standard way. What do you like about your neighborhood? What don't you like? What would you change? The answers were predictable and not especially illuminating.

I got frustrated and, thankfully, was in a position to shift the discussion to a different set of questions. How did you get here today? Do you feel safe getting around? If not, why? What keeps you from riding the bus? What happens when you try to walk somewhere?

This changed the entire dynamic of the conversation. Suddenly the participants weren't being asked to imagine themselves as planners. They were being asked to describe their lives. The conversation became richer, more detailed, and far more useful. We learned things, not because we had discovered a better engagement exercise, but because we had become more curious.

That word — curious — is the critical missing component of most public engagement. Most planning processes begin with a hidden assumption: we already know the solution and simply need public buy-in. The questions are designed to refine the answer.

But healthy cities don't emerge from certainty. They emerge from learning.

This is one reason I've always appreciated the work of organizations like A Better Block. Instead of asking people whether they support outdoor dining, they create temporary outdoor dining and observe what happens. Instead of debating whether a street should be more walkable, they temporarily make it more walkable and watch how people respond.

That's not merely public engagement. It's experimentation. It's learning. And learning requires humility.

The Strong Towns approach to public engagement starts with a simple question: Where are people struggling? Not: What is the comprehensive solution? Not: Which planning framework should we implement? Not: What does the master plan say?

Where are people struggling?

Once you identify a struggle, the next question is equally simple: What's the next smallest thing we can do to address it?

Then you do it. Then you observe. Then you learn. Then you repeat.

That process sounds unsophisticated compared to comprehensive plans, community visioning exercises, and five-year strategic frameworks. But it has one enormous advantage.

It begins with reality.

We spend a lot of time teaching residents how to think like planners. Maybe we should spend more time teaching planners how to think like residents.

After all, the people living in a place already know where it hurts. They already know where they struggle. They already know what makes them anxious, frustrated, delighted, and hopeful.

If we become curious enough to learn from that experience, we might discover that the most important questions are not the ones on our jargony surveys.

They're the ones we're not asking.

[[divider]]

*If this link is still active when this article goes live, check out just how bad the jargon is in the survey — and join me in the Commons to talk about it with other Strong Towns members.