Big-Picture Perspective

By Jon Kohl

It's a familiar story: Planning agency hires consultants to facilitate and write a technical comprehensive plan. Consultants hand over the finished plan to the client to approve and implement. ... Plan sits on the shelf, unimplemented.

That is exactly what happened back in 2005 when my four-person consulting team was hired to make meaning of the 12,500-square-mile Lumber Heritage Region in Northcentral Pennsylvania in a way that could be conveyed to visitors entering through eight gateways across 15 rural counties. The client asked us to write a comprehensive interpretive regional plan that would prescribe how future visitors would come to know this vast and beautiful forest crisscrossed with railroad lines, rivers, and old logging roads.

The process required sophisticated heritage interpretation, which we delivered in the form of an innovative GIS-based site inventory crossreferenced by gateways and thematic storylines to create multiday interpretive itineraries for hikers, bikers, and car-based sightseers.

Yet the plan languished on a virtual shelf for years before disappearing altogether when the Lumber Heritage Region, Inc. rebuilt its website in 2016. I asked LHR Director Holly Komonczi, who took over operations two years ago, about the plan; she admitted that she didn't know much about it.

Had we known in 2005 what we know today, we would have encouraged our client to set up the project entirely differently, using a more holistic approach that would have increased the final plan's chances of being implemented. In this article, I will share lessons from this Lumber Heritage Region planning experience, informed by my research into the various factors that influence implementation, that I hope will help planners transcend the chronic problem of nonimplementation.

Illustration by Laura Liedo.

Plans on shelves

Our Lumber Heritage Region plan — like many plans that go unimplemented — in some ways was doomed from the start, not in terms of the quality of planning but rather because of our process, which was based in what academics call "rational comprehensive planning," or RCP.

RCP occurs when planners use a technical, top-down approach that prioritizes scientific rational criteria above everything else, whether public involvement or other kinds of nonscientific knowledge such as traditional, intuitive, or spiritual. As a result, planners and project managers allow only "qualified" technical professionals to make decisions, while other stakeholder groups such as local community members share very little real decision-making power. Although planners frequently consult them for opinions or place them on committees stacked with technical professionals, they also restrict their access to opportunities to make decisions. The National Environmental Protection Act supports this state of affairs by requiring only that planners consult the public, while decision making remains with the technical planners in charge.

This planning mode regards implementation out-of-sight, out-of-mind; thus, planners often pay it little attention to the realities that impact it.

In truth, implementation does not begin after publication, as generally believed. It begins in the first moments of the planning process, when someone chooses who will wield power to set priorities and make decisions and who will not.

History of RCP

RCP traces back 400 years, when Enlightenment thinkers like Descartes and Newton argued that people could ascend in society using the power of their minds, rationality, and empirical science rather than be born into an inescapable social caste. This thinking released the West from the Dark Ages into the Industrial Age, during which rational science answered many solvable technical questions.

The world's population, political-economic systems, technology, and democracy have grown exponentially since RCP's origin. The rational, comprehensive model that served so well to build global industries can no longer keep pace with the accelerating change and complexity that encircles us today.

Academics have foreseen implementation problems since at least the 1960s when they criticized RCP as ineffective in a world of increasing uncertainty. They charged that planning that patiently studies comprehensive management options, constructs long-term strategies, goes through extensive review and approval, and then is published cannot meet expectations because the world quickly outdates such plans and sentences them to irrelevancy when they produce little on-the-ground change.

To solve the chronic problem of nonimplementation, the planning community must shift its planning approach from a rational to a holistic one that not only considers technical criteria, but social and cultural factors that also influence implementation.

From rational to holistic

Over the last few decades, several schools of planning thought have emerged to address RCP's weaknesses, including collaborative, participatory, adaptive, and transactive planning. Other fields have similarly responded with approaches like adaptive management, organizational learning, systems dynamics, new urbanism, smart growth, and many others.

Though each response covers part of reality that RCP misses, planners still need a more elegant solution that can map all these diverse strategies together and cover all the angles necessary to transcend RCP.

Surprisingly, we can find the solution in a rather unexpected corner of academia: philosophy. In the 1980s, philosopher Ken Wilber developed the Integral Theory, which posits that key elements of all the world's thought traditions and sciences can be pulled together to create a comprehensive map that can help reconcile humanity's many partial truths.

Wilber's comprehensive theory is too complex to fully explore in this article, but of the factors he integrates into his holistic theory that are needed to understand any situation — and which ultimately fuse all schools of human thinking — one critical aspect is particularly relevant to plan implementation: the interior and exterior dimensions of reality. Wilber says the singular and plural aspects of these two dimensions form the four basic perspectives (or quadrants) through which humans can look at anything, as seen below.

Seeing Implementation Through Holistic Lenses

For a complete view of the reality of (and potential barriers to) implementing a plan, planners need to take a holistic approach that accounts for all four perspectives. Using lessons from my consulting team's Lumber Heritage Region planning process as a framework, the table below shows what we did — the rational comprehensive actions our team took — and what taking holistic planning actions might have done to increase the likelihood of the plan's implementation.

Illustrations by Laura Liedo.

Interior

Individual (I)

Rational Action

Formulated project terms of reference based on data gathered from survey of stakeholder opinions and reactions, which we conducted prior to project start.

Holistic Approach

• Collaborate with stakeholders to design project terms that would better integrate their expectations, vision, goals, attitudes, and knowledge into the plan.
• Continually check in with stakeholders' feelings about how the project is developing and how their visions of the project and region have evolved. This creates several feedback mechanisms through which to address new concerns or worries that may crop up.

 

Collective (We)

Rational Approach

Supported client presumption that they were equipped to implement after we left. Reinforced client belief that technical analysis was more important than political reality.

Holistic Approach

• Facilitate stakeholders' construction of a common vision of adaptive management and continuously updated holistic plans so they can continue after project close-out.
• Codefine problems and uses of interpretation in heritage management so stakeholders better understand its relative value compared with other strategies.
• In joint fact-finding, seek an understanding of what all stakeholders want and consensus in the vision for the region.
• Build objectives for the implementation team that continues after consulting ends.

Exterior

Individual (I)

Rational Action

• Explained key concepts during planning workshops to participants.
• Provided food at meetings to meet standard expectations.
• Disconnected as soon as project fee was paid.

Holistic Approach

• Choose meeting locations that inspire creativity and thought.
• Offer stakeholders training in interpretation, holistic site assessment, facilitation, and adaptive planning to carry on after consultants finish the contract.
• Model transparency, respect, dialogue, openness to others' ideas, and authenticity to build a culture needed for implementation.
• Help local planners adopt a continuous adaptive management approach to updating the plan after consultants leave.

 

Collective (We)

Rational Approach

• Created technical rational comprehensive planning policy proposals that did not consider cultural, institutional, or financial limitations.
• Created an elegantly designed plan with our logo on the cover.

Holistic Approach

• Write terms of reference together with stakeholders, emphasizing cocreation and roles.
• Create a plan with easily updatable technology rather than one presented in a tightly laid-out, bound, and published document, which is expensive and difficult to update.
• Create a team that makes decisions together rather than consultants driving decisions.
• Create terms of reference flexible enough to accommodate changes as the project evolves.
• Create decision-making processes and choose tools that distribute decision-making power more widely among stakeholders.
• Only mention our firm (and no logo) in the planning document's acknowledgments.

In our fragmented, multidisciplinary society, professionals frequently limit themselves to certain quadrants. For example, psychologists prefer the psychology quadrant; trainers the behavior quadrant; anthropologists the culture quadrant; and planners the systems quadrant (e.g., rational comprehensive planning).

When planners account for only one or two of these perspectives rather than all four, we work blind to some forces that can scuttle plan implementation. For a more complete view of the reality in which planning and implementing occur, planners take into account all four perspectives during the planning process to make final plans as implementable as possible.

That fragmented approach is exactly what happened to our Lumber Heritage Region plan. Th e client hired our company in standard consultant mode to research, design, and write the plan. We conducted a site assessment, interviewed steering committee members, vetted our technical proposals, and designed the plan with our logo stamped on the cover. Neither the steering committee nor our contract required more community engagement and collective decision making than that.

What we missed

As consultants, we took advantage of that power to create an innovative technical plan that we as consultants were extremely proud of and excited about but that ultimately didn't mean much to the folks who had the power to oversee its implementation.

Thanks to my research into Wilber's Integral Theory, I know now where we went wrong. Our planning process generally ignored interior quadrants — psychology and culture.

We made multiple assumptions, including that the themes we chose for the plan truly captured stakeholders' sense of place; that they had resources to build the ambitious itineraries; that they understood the connection between interpretation and visitor satisfaction; and that local communities would adopt this vision.

As a result, our client and local stakeholders did not feel the same ownership, excitement, and deep understanding as we did about the plan. It was also probably too technical to use and too expensive for them to implement.

Had our consulting team and our client realized that implementation began long before we signed the contract, and we had entered the planning process with a holistic understanding, we could have co-developed with the steering committee a shared vision of the process (culture), built necessary skills such as adaptive planning to update their plan (behavior), established a continuous planning team (systems), and dialogued to better understand stakeholder views (psychology). With such an approach, how visitors experience Pennsylvania's Lumber Heritage Region today could be very different.

Jon Kohl is director of the PUP Global Heritage Consortium, a global nonprofit network created to promote a more holistic approach to heritage management and planning. He is also coauthor, with Stephen McCool, of The Future Has Other Plans: Planning Holistically to Conserve Natural and Cultural Heritage, which is the first comprehensive work to apply Integral Theory to planning.

Resources

The Future Has Other Plans: Planning Holistically to Conserve Natural and Cultural Heritage: https://amzn.to/2PMLfij.

Lumber Heritage Region Interpretation Plan: bit.ly/2xu4oxT.

Philosopher Ken Wilber explains the four quadrants: bit.ly/2MKMpJ9.

Introduction to Integral Theory: bit.ly/2NURdR4.