Bridging the communication gap
Transactive planning changes knowledge into action through an unbroken sequence of interpersonal relations. As a particular style of planning, it can be applied to both allocation and innovation. This chapter states the principal conditions for transactive planning and explores its major implications.
Transactive planning is a response to the widening gulf in communication between technical planners and their clients. To simplify the discussion, let us assume that planners as well as clients are individual persons rather than institutions, and that clients generate streams of action on which they wish to be advised.
This assumption is not altogether unrealistic. Institutions do not relate to each other as wholes, but through a complex series of exchanges among individuals. Although these individuals behave primarily according to their formal role prescriptions, each role masks a singular personality. Roles are defined by a set of abstract behavior patterns, but the person assuming a particular role may be straightforward or devious, disposed to be tranquil or angry, approachable or remote, eager for power or reluctant to assume responsibility. The planner steeped in the practice of the transactive style will try to reach out to the person who stands behind the formal role.
Planners and clients may experience difficulties communicating valid meanings to each other. The barriers to effective communication between those who have access primarily to processed knowledge and those whose knowledge rests chiefly on personal experience are rising. We have seen that this problem is not unique to America; it is found to some extent in all societies that seek the help of technical experts. Messages may be exchanged, but the relevant meanings are not effectively communicated. As a result, the linkage of knowledge with action is often weak or nonexistent. This is true even where planning forms part of the client system itself; even there, actions tend to proceed largely on the basis of acquired routines and the personal knowledge of the decision makers. Planners talk primarily to other planners, and their counsel falls on unresponsive ears. As we shall see, however, the establishment of a more satisfactory form of communication is not simply a matter of translating the abstract and highly symbolic language of the planner into the simpler and more experience-related vocabulary of the client. The real solution involves a restructuring of the basic relationship between planner and client.
Each has a different method of knowing: the planner works chiefly with processed knowledge abstracted from the world and manipulated according to certain postulates of theory and scientific method; his client works primarily from the personal knowledge he draws directly from experience. Although personal knowledge is much richer in content and in its ability to differentiate among the minutiae of daily life, it is less systematized and orderly than processed knowledge. It is also less capable of being generalized and, therefore, is applicable only to situations where the environment has not been subject to substantial change. The “rule of thumb” by which practical people orient their actions is useful only so long as the context of action remains the same. Processed knowledge, on the other hand, implies a theory about some aspect of the world. Limited in scope, it offers a general explanation for the behavior of a small number of variables operating under a specified set of constraints.
The difficulties of relating these two methods of knowing to each other reside not only in their different foci of attention and degrees of practical relevance (processed knowledge suppresses the operational detail that may be of critical importance to clients), but also in language. The planner’s language is conceptual and mathematical, consciously drained of the lifeblood of human intercourse in its striving for scientific objectivity. It is intended to present the results of his research in ways that will enable others, chiefly other planners, to verify each statement in terms of its logic, consistency with empirical observation, and theoretical coherence. Most planners prefer communicating their ideas in documents complete with charts, tables, graphs, and maps, as well as long appendices containing complex mathematical derivations and statistical analyses. The concepts, models, and theories to which these documents refer are often unfamiliar to the clients to whom they are supposedly addressed.
The language of clients lacks the formal restrictions that hedge in planning documents. It, too, employs a jargon to speed communications, but the jargon will be experience- rather than concept-related. Client language is less precise than the language of planners, and it may encompass congeries of facts and events that, even though they form a meaningful whole in terms of practice, are unrelated at the level of theory. Planners may therefore seize upon a favorite term from their client’s specialized vocabulary and subject it to such rigorous analysis that what originally might have been a meaningful expression to the client is given back to him as a series of different but theoretically related concepts that reflect a processed reality.
Housing administrators, for example, have long been accustomed to derive quantitative program targets from what they call the housing deficit, which is calculated on the basis of new household formations, a physical index of housing quality, and an estimated rate of housing obsolescence. Planners have recently replaced this concept with what they believe to be a theoretically more valid model for establishing the housing needs of a population. They postulate an effective housing demand that arises in the context of particular submarkets organized according to major income levels and locality. Each submarket has unique characteristics with respect to the type of housing offered, the credit available, and the degree to which it is able to satisfy the social – as distinct from the economic – demand of each population group. Aggregate housing demand, therefore, is seen to evolve not only in accord with the differential growth rates of the affected population groups but also in relation to changes in the growth and distribution of personal income and in the structural characteristics of each submarket.
I do not know how housing administrators will react to this conceptually more satisfying model for calculating housing requirements, but I suspect that they will not be overly pleased. They may even accuse the planner of purposefully misconstruing the “real” (i.e. experiential) meaning contained in the traditional and administratively more convenient term of housing deficit.
The language of clients – so difficult to incorporate into the formalized vocabulary of the planner – is tied to specific operational contexts. Its meanings shift with changes in the context, and its manner of expression is frequently as important as the actual words employed. This is probably the reason why planners prefer written to verbal communications, and why the latter tend to be in the form of highly stylized presentations. Tone of voice, emphasis, subtle changes in grammatical structure and word sequence, so important in the face-to-face communications of action-oriented persons, are consistently de-emphasized by planners. Whereas planners’ formal communications could be translated by a computer into a foreign language without substantial loss of meaning, a tape-recorded conversation among clients could not.
Planners relate primarily to other members of their profession and to the university departments responsible for the transmission and advancement of professional knowledge. Clients, on the other hand, relate chiefly to organizations of their own kind. The reference group of each acts as a cultural matrix that helps to confirm and strengthen differences of approach and behavior.
Reference groups are powerful institutions for molding behavior. This is especially true for the planner, whose situation tends to be less secure than that of his clients. His professional association not only keeps him continuously informed through newsletters, specialized journals, and conferences, but also confers on him the dignity and status of formal membership in a profession. The association reassures him when his competence is being challenged by outsiders and provides support when it is needed. In order to receive these benefits, the planner must conform to the norms of professional conduct. There are countless planning documents whose content is not primarily addressed to clients but to other planning professiona...
