[Massplanners] Planner Burnout

[Nathan Chung]

Hi Mariah,
I commend you for taking the risk to open up and write about a very
important topic that people might be afraid to talk about. Planning in
real-life is full of messy human relationships and emotions, not so dry and
rigid like the regulations and some literature would have you believe. I
also went to the UMass planning program. I recently started working in the
Northampton Office of Planning and Sustainability as the CDBG admin,
supporting our director and community development planner. I previously
worked in IT for several years and briefly dabbled in physical work like
restaurants and farms. The lessons from those experiences helped me with my
job even if I am a newbie who still has a lot to learn. I will share some
ideas that may help reduce stress and improve relationships. Mainly, my
suggestion is to try to remove problems rather than add potential solutions
and to find some commonality with people, which might not always be
possible. Details are below. Take them with a big grain of salt. And
another vote for taking breaks and going outside. Many Americans are
Vitamin D deficient.

1. Via negativa: This idea comes from theology, but people have expanded it
into a general approach of solving problems through subtraction rather than
addition. You have limited time, energy, and cognitive capacity. You might
be getting pulled in all kinds of different tasks, volunteer orgs, and
publications. Human knee jerk reaction to complexity and struggles is to
add more processes, documents, superfoods, and productivity tools, but the
via negativa approach questions the wisdom of that approach. You might be
better off to slow down, reflect, and simplify (saying no to some
commitments and reducing your activities and inputs) to move faster and
stay sane over the long-run. There have been stories of organizations
becoming more efficient by combining departments or simplifying their
focus. In my work, I had to fill out several forms and
spreadsheets repeating the same information. This was a huge source of
stress for me as they took a long time to fill them out and were error
prone. Finding a mistake meant I had to correct it in several different
places. I spent some time gradually automating in Excel to auto-generate
most of the forms and sheets and also consolidated some of them.

2. Seeing the legitimacy in people's concerns and finding some commonality:
This is more speculative as I am yet to witness this being done well in a
real-life government or non-gov meeting, although it comes up a lot in
conflict resolution literature. I think with COVID and numerous other
challenges Americans are facing, people have become more polarized and
siloed, opting to believe in simpler linear narratives rather than seeing
the messy reality. What concerned me when I used to watch infotainment TV
(regardless of its political orientation and claims of being factual, any
news show with a specific person's name in the title is a dead giveaway as
infotainment) were their tendency to ridicule and caricaturize people that
did not agree with their main ideas. Learning about people's struggles and
reading some jolting literature (Chris Arnade's Dignity is an example with
a big warning) made me take the view that even if I may strongly disagree
with somebody's specific ideas and solutions, their underlying concerns and
anxiety are legitimate. If somebody gets up during a town meeting and says,
"The Reptile People are taking over our town!" I would disagree, but if
somebody says, "A small number of people with disproportionate power and
possibly malicious intent are doing things behind the scenes to control how
we live," I am pretty confident 95% of people will agree with that
statement to some degree. If public processes can somehow allow for civil
dialogues to dig in deeper rather than 3-minutes podium time and shouting
matches, maybe we will get things done more easily, but that's conjecture.
I question the effectiveness of some charrettes because they are asking
people to be experts in domains where they have no experience, i.e.
designing roads and re-writing the zoning code. But they are experts in the
lived experience and can verbalize their ideas well if given the right
questions. If I ever get a chance to run a meeting, it would be interesting
to ask people to imagine a better town and visually draw out their ideas.

It seems like you have good people to support you. Hope you can find some
relief and progress..

Nathan Chung, Grants Administrator
Planning & Sustainability
City of Northampton
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