Future Here Now: What about the people? Hellooo?

Try It On

This week’s Future Here Now focuses on an issue that struck me over and over again while I was at the National Planning Conference last week. In many professions (urban planning being one of them), we say that we are doing what we are doing for the people - residents, customers, students, whatever - but we fail to deeply understand their motives, their desires and their behavior. Instead, we imagine how we think that they should respond to the ways that we change their environment.

And when they don’t respond like we expected, we shrug, or we explain it away, or we accuse them of not understanding their own needs, of not being rational.

What we don’t want to admit is that we very seldom get their motivations and priorities right, and they very seldom act the way we assumed that they would. And that means that our big ideas and grand plans and really lovely products very often fail to make the impact we promised — or they create unintended consequences that can be worse than what we were trying to fix in the first place.

From my perspective, the problem isn’t that our residents or customers aren’t rational actors. The problem is that too many of us who are in the business of creating solutions are more interested in our own visions than in understanding how other people actually think and work.

Try It On

This requires the cooperation of your friend, spouse, partner, at least semi-grown child, or trusted co-worker.

On a piece of paper, by yourself, write down how you think your person would respond to three situations: