I teach an Urban Studies class called “Planning the Canadian City” at the University of Calgary.  Recently, we had an interesting discussion about professions, learning and change.  We were fortunate to have Pat Gordon as our guest speaker.  Pat is the project manager for the Plan It Calgary project – Calgary’s integrated land use and mobility plan. 

After her presentation on the direction that Plan It is heading, one of our students asked Pat “how do you ensure that things don’t go back to the ‘old way’ of doing business at City Hall after you have finished this project?” 

A very important question with no easy answers. 

Pat spoke about the importance of having people with varied experiences, professions and backgrounds on the team to avoid groupthink.  She also felt strongly that there is a distinct advantage to having people on the team that are earlier in their careers to bring a more fresh perspective to the work.  I then added to the conversation by mentioning a phenomenon that I have observed as planners move their career. 

It seems that there is an interesting learning curve that happens for planners.  I’m sure this happens across many professions, but I’ll pick on planners for the time being.  In school, many students have big ideas and really want to change the world and how things work.  This changes over time.  It doesn’t happen overnight, but in a number of slow steps:

Step 1 – Students complete school and enter the planning field.

Step 2 – In starting their careers, they realize they still have a great deal to learn. This makes sense.  Planning is a very complex profession and each community or organization has its own history that young planners need to know and understand.

Step 3 – Here is where the shift (potentially) starts to happen. As they begin to learn about why their particular organization, institution or community behaves or makes decisions a certain way, they start to think that that is the way of approaching an issue.

Step 4 – If they start to make the shift in Step 3, then they think of the ideas they had in school as overly idealistic, unrealistic or just generally impossible.  Slowly, these ideas of change shrink in the rearview mirror as their careers move down the road.  

Step 5 – By this point, these planners have all but lost their initial hopes for making change and in the extreme cases have become one of those people that when asked why things are done a certain way, they respond “Because we’ve always done it that way.”

This can be reflected by a conversation that I overhead a few months ago: 

“Traffic is getting really bad these days, isn’t it?”

“It sure is.  It takes me forever to get downtown to work these days. Sometimes up to an hour each way.”

“Yeah, well, there’s nothing you can do about it anyways.  It’s just too bad.”

Where did I hear this?  AT A PLANNING CONFERENCE in Banff, Alberta this past fall.  This exemplifies someone that has reached that 5^th stage of their career.  These are professionals that help shape how cities are built and yet have this fatalistic, I-can’t-do-anything-about-it attitude towards the work.  Whether for personal sanity, making their life easier or painful experience, these individuals felt that they could no longer make a difference. 

My message to the class was that it is up to them to keep their ideas alive, to take the time to remember why they got into the profession in the first place, and to have the tenacity to stick with it.  I’m not advocating for blind ignorance of reality.  On the contrary.  Having a clear understanding of the realities – including institutional knowledge of why decisions have been made a certain way in the past – helps to move toward the improved future that many planners start their career thinking they’ll contribute to.  That’s why it’s so important to continually learn, listen to other perspectives and look for new ways of doing the work.  The balance is to understand your context without becoming so immersed in it that you lose perspective, much like a quote I once heard:

“To a worm in a jar of sauerkraut, the whole world is sauerkraut.”

- John, March 18, 2009

Labels: change, learning, professions

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