A group of us faculty at the Planning Program at Vancouver Island University have started a small project to put names to some of the dysfunctional things we see in planning today and organize it informally into an Irreverent Planning Glossary.
The first entry we have put out is “Post-it-Note Planning.”
- Post-it-Note Planning is the method of planning that writes plans and policy directly based on the acquisition of ideas (often on post-it notes) from individuals who know little about the complexity and constraints of urban development or policy issues (usually through a community consultation process). These polices are then written, recommended and often adopted into plans without any due diligence, assessment or feasibility analysis.
Post-it-note planning has numerous negative impacts – foremost amongst them is that it creates confusion between consultation and real planning work. Consultation is a small subset of planning work. The full scope of competent planning entails a significant amount of technical knowledge and work on many issues.
This lack of due diligence on the Post-it-note content can often lead to unrealistic expectations and ineffective plans and policies that rarely get implemented. This failure then can cause significant conflict when development tries to occur due to the plan’s lack of realism. It also increases community cynicism because they feel their input was ignored or not acted upon. It also wastes a lot of community resources because the consultation focuses on accumulating wide-eyed aspirations on post-it notes rather than doing difficult technical planning work on the real options that the community faces, educating them on those issues and then asking for their feedback on those options.