Resisting the Prospect of Loss
People love change.
We love a winning lottery ticket, an accepted marriage proposal, the announcement of a child’s birth, a graduation, a promotion, a new home, a recovered friendship, or a long-awaited opportunity. Each can alter a life profoundly. What makes these changes welcome is not their familiarity or ease. It is that they promise gain.
What people hate, and therefore resist, is not change, as the common refrain goes, but loss—and the fear of loss. We resist the loss of money, status, authority, security, identity, certainty, familiar relationships, settled assumptions, and confidence in the future. Even the possibility of such losses can generate powerful anxiety. And when anxiety rises, individuals and institutions often become less interested in understanding what is happening than in protecting themselves from what that understanding might require.
This is one of the most important things I have learned during more than 35 years of planning and community development work.
I have watched audiences sense that I am about to present evidence they will not like—evidence that may oblige them to reconsider an assumption, relinquish an ambition, change a behavior, or make a choice they have been avoiding. The response frequently follows a recognizable progression.
First, challenge the data. The numbers must be wrong, incomplete, outdated, biased, or insufficiently local. If the evidence holds, challenge the process. The study moved too quickly. The wrong questions were asked. The right people were not consulted. More engagement, more analysis, or more time is needed. If the process withstands scrutiny, challenge the messenger. The person presenting the findings is negative, insensitive, arrogant, alarmist, biased, or unfamiliar with the community.
At each stage, the apparent subject changes. The underlying purpose does not: avoid the obligation to adapt.
It is the responsibility of the good planner to help client communities understand the work ahead. This requires a commitment to clarity and capacity building. The best planning is a dialogue in which the planner acts less as instructor than as facilitator, using disciplined inquiry to uncover a community’s latent ideal—its own vision of justice, resilience, and growth. The work is not simply to deliver a plan or project. It is to strengthen the community’s capacity for strategic inquiry and good decision-making, leaving it with greater agency to pursue meaningful outcomes.
When Everything Is Important
Most communities have little difficulty identifying important things. Ask what matters and the answers come quickly: housing, infrastructure, public safety, economic development, schools, parks, transportation, equity, sustainability, neighborhoods, downtown, workforce development, arts and culture, and on and on and on some more.
The resulting list may contain 10, 20, or 30 objectives, each worthy to someone or some group. The list may reflect careful listening and broad agreement. But a list is not a strategy.
Strategy begins when a community winnows its initial list of everything into the three, four, or five things that matter most—especially when money, time, institutional capacity, land, and political attention are insufficient to do everything.
That reduction is difficult because prioritization is not principally an exercise in ranking. It is an exercise in loss. Saying that one thing comes first means saying that something else does not. It means “not now,” “not here,” “not at this scale,” or sometimes simply “no.”
Those decisions can threaten programs, positions, constituencies, investments, professional identities, and long-held beliefs about how a community works. Consequently, institutions often replace choices with lists. Everything becomes a priority, which allows nothing to be treated as one.
This is where planning too often fails.
Rather than help clients work through the losses embedded in consequential choices, we planners too frequently help them avoid the choices. We expand the list, add qualifications, schedule another meeting, or recommend another study. In the name of diplomacy or poorly conceived consensus building, we become complicit in work avoidance. We soften the language and blur sentences into “both/and” when adaptation requires “either/or.” We call the result inclusive because everyone can find something they support. But a plan that promises everything has made no choices, and a plan that makes no choices cannot guide action when choices become unavoidable.
The good planner constantly sharpens the argument, using disciplined, targeted questions to challenge assumptions and expose gaps in a community’s current understanding. The good planner moves the community from comfortable certainty toward productive confusion. Most planners avoid this because the likelihood of everything going off the rails is ever-present, failure is always possible, the work is really hard, our efforts rarely pencil, and it can leave everyone exhausted.
Technical Activity and Adaptive Work
Some problems can be solved through technical adjustments. A schedule can be changed. Software can be replaced. A procedure can be rewritten. A street can be redesigned. A zoning provision can be amended. Expertise and established practice can often supply an answer.
Other problems require the people involved to change.
They may have to reconsider what they believe, alter how they behave, renegotiate relationships, surrender authority, acknowledge limits, or most commonly of all, accept that a familiar approach – their approach – simply no longer works. It is important to distinguish these adaptive challenges from technical problems—those for which existing knowledge, expertise, and institutional arrangements can provide an adequate solution.¹
Most large, persistent community problems contain both technical and adaptive elements. Yet we repeatedly reach for technical solutions because they allow us to act without changing ourselves.
We reorganize the committee rather than resolve the disagreement. We redesign the engagement process rather than confront the tradeoff. We purchase software rather than change how decisions are made. We commission a new plan rather than implement—or formally reject—the last one. We accept study results known to be flawed because we like the story they tell, and silence those who refuse to go along with the charade. We modify the schedule rather than assign responsibility. We produce better pictures of a desired future rather than change the policies, budgets, regulations, and behaviors that perpetuate the present.
Knowingly or not, the planning profession has become remarkably skilled at helping clients remain in motion, appearing to undergo needed change while determinedly avoiding adaptation. That may preserve a comfortable process, but it does not produce progress.
We see this especially in housing, where the vectors of choice and consequence converge in ways that Schelling demonstrated mathematically and that remain deeply uncomfortable in practice. We see it in the generalized and often sloppy pursuit of ambitions for equity—poorly defined, assiduously argued, and rarely called fully to account when someone has to pay for them. We see it in cities with two-thirds of their industrial-era peak population, essentially all of the infrastructure built to serve that population, and a fraction of the former economic base, yet still unwilling to decommission infrastructure or right-size systems because doing so would mean confronting what has actually happened.
The good planner is sometimes the proverbial dog on the FedEx driver’s ankle, sometimes the cheerleader, sometimes the teacher with technical expertise—whether in urban design, GIS, or econometrics—and sometimes the scold. The hard work is keeping all those plates spinning without losing sight of the objective: growing the client’s capacity to make really good decisions.
Seeing a Downward Line
Consider a line on a chart showing decades of population decline.
The line is information. But people do not experience it neutrally. They see fewer residents, weaker demand, declining value, reduced influence, and a diminished future. They anticipate loss.
The common response is not to ask what the evidence means or how the community might become stronger under changed conditions. It is to insist that the line must be reversed.
We actually had a client who wanted hard data we’d mapped, data from their own police department, data essential to explaining how crime was empirically affected housing prices and reinvestment patterns, expunged from the report, and that we agree never to discuss those statistical realities in public again. True story.
People see evidence that the prevailing model is not working and conclude that they must pursue it more aggressively, fully unwilling to embrace the first law of holes.
This is not adaptation. It is repetition.
The better question is not always, “How do we make the line go back up?” Sometimes it is, “How do we become better even if we do not become bigger?”
That question may require a community to distinguish prosperity from expansion, outcomes from outputs, and productive investment from activity. It may require concentrating limited resources rather than distributing them everywhere. It may require acknowledging that every new facility, road, program, or development creates obligations extending far beyond the ribbon cutting—and that costs deferred, displaced, or imposed on others remain costs.
Short-term decisions rarely stay in the short term. They accumulate.²
So do individually reasonable choices. One property owner neglects maintenance. One household leaves. One business follows its customers. One lender tightens its standards. One institution relocates. One more investment is deferred. No single decision creates the resulting condition, yet together they can concentrate disadvantage, weaken confidence, and make the next adverse decision more likely.³
The reverse can also occur. Small gains can attract additional gains. Confidence can reinforce confidence. Diversity—of people, institutions, uses, ideas, and forms of investment—can make places more adaptable and resilient. But positive outcomes do not arise simply because everyone pursues an immediate private interest. Shared resources require stewardship, rules, trust, reciprocity, and enforcement. Without them, rational individual behavior can produce collective loss.⁴
This is the recurring challenge of community life: what makes sense for each participant in isolation may be problematic for everyone in combination.
It is the responsibility of the good planner to help client communities navigate these tensions, not avoid them, and to help communities push through the distress they produce. The good planner ripens issues while growing the community’s capacity to stretch, adapt, and make hard—sometimes really hard—choices in the face of downward lines.
The Cost of What We Do Not Do
Every decision consumes more than money.
It consumes time, land, attention, institutional capacity, political capital, and the public’s limited tolerance for disruption. Using those resources for one purpose makes them unavailable for another.
Yet planning processes tend to examine proposals in isolation. We tend to ask whether a project is beneficial, not whether it is more beneficial than the alternatives it displaces. We ask whether an initiative is worthy, not whether it is worthy enough. We count its visible benefits but rarely identify the more valuable work that will remain undone because this work was chosen.
The forgone alternative leaves no ribbon to cut, no building to photograph, and no constituency organized around what never occurred. Its absence makes it easy to ignore.
But the cost is real.
A dollar spent extending infrastructure cannot also repair existing infrastructure. Staff time devoted to an initiative of marginal value cannot be used to implement a consequential one. Political attention spent defending a weak compromise cannot be invested in building support for a necessary decision. Land committed to one pattern of development is unavailable for another, perhaps for generations.⁵
A strategy that does not account for what it prevents is not a strategy. It is a list of expenditures.
The good planner understands that there is no free lunch and never lets the client forget it.
What Planning Is For
CZB understands planning as the disciplined work of making choices under conditions of scarcity, uncertainty, and competing interests. Our responsibility is not to manufacture agreement where none exists. It is absolutely not to protect clients from the discomfort of having to confront the imperative to make consequential decisions. It is, rather, to help them achieve sufficient clarity to choose, sufficient courage to act, and sufficient discipline to remain accountable for results.
That means we do not treat every moment of discomfort as a failure of the process. Sometimes discomfort means that evidence has exposed a consequential choice. Sometimes resistance means that an assumption can no longer be sustained. Sometimes conflict means that a community has finally reached the work it hired us to help it do.
Our obligation in those moments is neither to provoke nor to retreat. It is to keep the evidence clear, the process fair, the choices visible, and the conversation focused on the decisions required. While that is our obligation I should be forthright; I always want to retreat, in the face of pressure, and too often have. It is hard and often personally taxing work to conduct the distress unleashed in a community when there are only hard choices, no easy answers, and lots of unknowns. It is hard to resist the temptation to take out a sharpie and try to fix what isn’t fixable in the ways the clients wants.
But clarity without strategy is just understanding. Strategy without progress is merely intention. And the movement from clarity to strategy and from strategy to progress requires more than analysis. It requires people and institutions to face the possibility of loss without allowing fear of that loss to govern them. It requires a lot of the planner.
Over the course of my career, I have repeatedly encountered five obstacles to that work: the refusal to prioritize, the preference for immediate gains over full costs, the difficulty of governing shared interests, the tendency of individual choices to concentrate dysfunction, and the failure to account for opportunities forgone.
These obstacles are not separate. They reinforce one another. We avoid priorities because priorities expose loss. We favor the short term because tomorrow’s costs are easier to ignore. We free-ride because individual benefits are immediate while collective damage is dispersed. Those choices accumulate and concentrate, making already weak places weaker and strong places stronger. Throughout, we overlook the better uses of resources that our choices have displaced.
In essays to follow, I will examine each of these patterns more closely—not as abstract theories, but as forces we encounter continually in planning and community development. They help explain why communities with extensive plans, substantial expertise, sincere leadership, and no shortage of activity can nevertheless make little progress.
The central question running through all of them will be the same:
When the evidence tells us that familiar thinking and behavior can no longer produce the future we want, will we attack the evidence, improve the appearance of the process, and continue doing what we know?
Or will we do the harder work of adapting?
Notes
This essay grows out of more than 35 years of professional practice and reflects my own synthesis of ideas learned from teachers, colleagues, writers, and scholars across several fields. The examples, arguments, and formulations are my own unless otherwise indicated. The following notes acknowledge some of the intellectual foundations that have most directly shaped my thinking.
1. Change, loss, and adaptive work. The distinction between technical problems and adaptive challenges originates in Ronald A. Heifetz’s Leadership Without Easy Answers (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1994). Heifetz’s work also provides the intellectual foundation for this essay’s understanding of anticipated loss, anxiety, prioritization, and work avoidance. The title—“People Don’t Resist Change. They Resist Loss.”—is my concise restatement of insights from Heifetz and others. Heifetz subsequently developed and applied these ideas with others; see Ronald A. Heifetz and Marty Linsky, Leadership on the Line: Staying Alive Through the Dangers of Change (Harvard Business School Press, 2002), and Ronald A. Heifetz, Alexander Grashow, and Marty Linsky, The Practice of Adaptive Leadership (Harvard Business Press, 2009).
2. Full costs and long time horizons. The argument that public and private decisions must account for costs displaced across time, geography, ecological systems, and populations has been shaped by Paul Hawken, Amory Lovins, and L. Hunter Lovins, Natural Capitalism: Creating the Next Industrial Revolution (Little, Brown, 1999), as well as by the work of Wendell Berry, Edward O. Wilson, Mark Dowie, Michael Goldman, and others. Their work differs substantially in subject and method, but collectively reinforces a central principle: costs do not cease to exist because they are deferred, externalized, dispersed, or excluded. Rather, they are shifted, often allowing private gains to be obtained at public expense. The discussion of institutions repeatedly adjusting procedures without reconsidering their governing assumptions also reflects Chris Argyris’s distinction between single-loop and double-loop learning. See Chris Argyris, “Teaching Smart People How to Learn,” Harvard Business Review 69, no. 3 (1991), and Chris Argyris and Donald A. Schön, Organizational Learning: A Theory of Action Perspective (Addison-Wesley, 1978). Single-loop learning corrects performance within an existing framework; double-loop learning examines whether the framework, goals, or underlying assumptions themselves must change.
3. Individual choices and concentrated outcomes. The observation that individually understandable choices can combine to produce large, unintended, and self-reinforcing social patterns owes much to Thomas C. Schelling’s Micromotives and Macrobehavior (W. W. Norton, 1978); Robert Axelrod’s The Evolution of Cooperation (Basic Books, 1984); and Joshua M. Epstein and Robert Axtell’s Growing Artificial Societies: Social Science from the Bottom Up (Brookings Institution Press and MIT Press, 1996). Scott E. Page’s work, particularly The Difference: How the Power of Diversity Creates Better Groups, Firms, Schools, and Societies (Princeton University Press, 2007), has also influenced my understanding of diversity as a source of adaptability, problem-solving capacity, and resilience.
4. Collective action and shared resources. The discussion of individually rational behavior producing damaging collective outcomes draws on the broad literature concerning collective action, free riding, and governance of the commons. Important foundations include Mancur Olson, The Logic of Collective Action (Harvard University Press, 1965); Garrett Hardin, “The Tragedy of the Commons,” Science 162, no. 3859 (1968); and Elinor Ostrom, Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action (Cambridge University Press, 1990). Ostrom’s work is especially important because it demonstrates that shared-resource dilemmas are neither hopeless nor governed by a single universal solution: communities can devise durable institutions based on rules, reciprocity, monitoring, trust, and enforcement.
5. Opportunity cost, public choice, and decision-making under constraint. The discussion of forgone alternatives reflects lessons absorbed from Alan A. Altshuler, José A. Gómez-Ibáñez, Howard Raiffa, and others who have examined public investment, infrastructure, negotiation, and decision-making under conditions of uncertainty and scarcity. See, among other works, Alan A. Altshuler and David E. Luberoff, Mega-Projects: The Changing Politics of Urban Public Investment (Brookings Institution Press and Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, 2003); José A. Gómez-Ibáñez, Regulating Infrastructure: Monopoly, Contracts, and Discretion (Harvard University Press, 2003); and John S. Hammond, Ralph L. Keeney, and Howard Raiffa, Smart Choices: A Practical Guide to Making Better Decisions(Harvard Business School Press, 1999).
6. Moral imagination and the possibility of alternatives. Beneath these analytical influences lies a set of moral questions: Who benefits? Who pays? What obligations do present decisions create for other people and future generations? Which losses are unavoidable, and who is expected to bear them? The writings of Reinhold Niebuhr, Harvey Cox, Paulo Freire, André Trocmé, John Rawls, Michael Sandel, Saskia Sassen, and Ursula K. Le Guin have helped shape how I approach those questions. Their influence here is not reducible to a particular passage or proposition. It lies in the conviction that serious analysis must be joined to moral responsibility—and that conditions presented as inevitable should always be examined for the possibility of a more just alternative.
