Even before COVID-19 arrived, communities and organizations around the world faced extraordinary change on several fronts ranging from the torrent of disruptive technologies to record-breaking climate-related events.
Despite the enormous effort and resources devoted to corporate and community planning, few prepare for this degree of change. As it turns out, traditional planning processes are ill-equipped to address uncertainty, leading professional planners from across disciplines to examine the shortcomings of standard practices.
For example, conventional transportation and land-use planning tends to view the future as the extension of past trendlines. Regional planners often try to assign a number for traffic or housing demand by extrapolating data from past growth or migration patterns. Unfortunately, today’s disruptive trends have few predicates, which is why they come with names like novel viruses and emerging technologies.
This is not to suggest that cities, counties, and companies abandon planning — getting in front of trends is more important now than ever before. Instead, we need to reinvent planning in ways that explore, characterize, and incorporate uncertainty and the “what ifs” of possible futures for any plan or project likely affected by a range of technologies, climate change, and other developments. The most urgent reason lies in your current workflow. Without considering trends, your final plans and project designs may already be obsolete.
At WGI, our professionals are on the forefront of this reinvention, creating new planning techniques and customized project designs to fit clients’ needs. Our team seized the opportunity for a range of next-generation techniques like exploratory scenario planning and technology foresight that apply to all our service areas.