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Happy New Year everyone! Time for type A people to make a long list of overambitious goals and resolutions that’ll be abandoned in a month or two.
That whole exercise reminds me of the sad state of public planning, particularly in the US. Take a city, any city or municipal government therein, and you’ll find oodles of plans on their website. Long, shiny and lots of consultant hours went into those static pdfs. Yet ask a random manager from one of those organizations what they’re specifically doing to prepare for the extreme weather expected to be more common in their area or how to prepare for the shift in urban land use downstream of AV adoption and difficult challenges like that will not in my experience get a specific, actionable answer.
The challenge of climate change and the mobility revolution are epochal, wickedly complex problems so perhaps those examples aren’t entirely fair. Yet the situation certainly is suboptimal. Britain’s Dominick Cummings, an ex No. 10 special advisor and key architect of Brexit, talks about how when top civil service staff are asked what they’re doing today to prepare for a specific future and the answer is either 1) idle speculation or 2) de facto ignoring the issue in favor of the perpetual urgency of the Current Thing.
Why is this the case? Government staff is isolated from urgent exigencies like needing to make payroll and numerous historical examples of far reaching public planning exist. See for example the Ise Jingu shrine, Roman aqueduct at Segovia or the construction of the interstate highway system. With persistent resources, the public sector is well positioned from a first principles perspective to plan for the future.
Incentives certainly play a role. There’s several infamous charts for example of transportation planners linearly extrapolating transportation demand and missing the trend again and again. Said organizations’ funding is a function of transportation demand, ergo the issue.
Americans' travel behavior is changing dramatically. It seems like not a week passes without a new report about the decline in driving. But are state and local transportation agencies - which are responsible for much of the nation's highway and transportation planning - keeping up with the facts on the ground?
There’s powerful forces that encourage herd behavior. It’s extremely difficult for civil service staff to lose their jobs but taking a big wrong bet or not being sufficiently responsive to elected decision makers is not a recipe for career success, to put it mildly. Much more work needs to be done so smart risk taking is rewarded.
In my experience though, the biggest reason why governments struggle today to plan is that so many plans are mandated. That may be a bit counterintuitive, but when there’s a plan for everything under the sun, those documents become less a statement of future commitments and more a box checking exercise. Further with so many plans with so many ostensible action items, it’s difficult for management, staff and decision makers to actually keep all the plans straight in their heads, particularly when many of said plans only have small differences in scope.
The broader proliferation of mandates is part of the larger problem of what’s been called the “proceduralism fetish” in government. Code for America` founder and frequent essayist on state capacity issues Jennifer Palkha has a great piece out on how public sector hiring rules twist the original intent of objective processes into tragicomically Kafka-esque processes. Ultimately you have to trust people to use their judgement and make decisions — whether that’s hiring a team or managing a program or making a plan for the future.
As one of those annoying type A people that loves to make New Years resolutions and overambitious plans, I've begrudgingly found the wisdom embedded in simple, straightforward plans. Note simple does not mean easy. FDR’s plan to win World War Two famously fit on a napkin and formed the inspiration for the great book Speed and Scale providing a climate action plan put together by legendary VC John Doerr. I'm also reminded of the Stanford football teams goals from Harbaugh's first season at the farm. That first year there was a smorgasbord that literally was all over the place with lines erased, rewritten, and crossed off as items were reprioritized on the whiteboard. A few seasons later, the plan was simple: win a Pac-12 championship, which they went on to do.
Today, the vacuum of good planning and the transformational change provided by digital tools offers a vast frontier for new institutional structures to envision, design and then build a brighter future. New initiatives like DOGE focus on the federal government, neglecting the bulk of American government at the state and local level, as well as the wider shift in digital tools affecting governments globally. A [C]alifornia [A]lternative [T]ransformation C.A.T. protocol focusing on bottom up innovation provides a path for pioneering that frontier. More to come.
Collect this post as an NFT.
