Power vs control

The more you try to control knowledge workers, the less power you have.

That's one of the key challenges facing managers in the knowledge economy - which includes urban planning, as well as community and economic development.  (Any organization whose primary work involves creating and sharing ideas is part of the knowledge economy.)  Knowledge creation workers are those people whose main jobs are creating and distributing ideas or information.  You most likely fit in this category.

The function of management is to achieve results as efficiently as possible.  Traditionally, managers do this through control and coordination.  This makes sense when talking about inanimate resources - funds, equipment, property, etc.  In the late 19th century and early 20th century, promoters of bureaucracy and scientific management extended this idea to people.  Actually, treating people like property or farm animals is as old as slavery.  Authors like Weber and Taylor helped bosses justify this treatment.

In those days, this way of thinking seemed to work (for the companies). Before the advent of unions, most industrial workers had few options.  Large families often depended on single wage-earners, who often had limited education and limited resources.  And the output of industrial workers could be easily measured.  So if a manager treated a scared worker like a pack animal, and the worker produced more, the manager felt justified.

Let's put aside the moral issues of literally dehumanizing people by treating them as capital.  Why is the old industrial model ineffective with today's knowledge workers?

Most industrial age workers produced tangible products, through the combination of physical labor and machines. With the exception of those workers who could carry all their equipment with them, industrial age workers had to be at specific locations at specific times for the organization to run efficiently.  Knowledge workers produce ideas.  They can function anywhere, anytime. In economic terms, knowledge workers "own the means of production."  In industrial organizations, the machinery and the physical health of the worker had to be strong to produce more units.  (The quality of the units depended on the workers' motivation, but quality control wasn't as big a concern for management researchers a century ago.)  The ability of knowledge workers to produce more and better ideas depends on more than their competence and creativity.  Their emotional state is just as important.  A knowledge worker who is angry, distracted, has low morale or feels powerless is going to produce at a lower level of quality and quantity.  You can't measure the amount or worth of knowledge that doesn't happen.   Since you can't get inside a worker's brain and soul, you can't know when or whether a knowledge worker is at peak production.  Most knowledge workers are sophisticated enough to know how to appear productive.  So they can spend hours at the office "doing their job" without producing.

What do knowledge workers want?  The same things everybody does - respect, flexibility, acknowledgment and affirmation.  Workers who are committed to an organization's mission want to be treated as resources, not capital.  (Anyone who thinks that workers are motivated only by money needs to take a basic course in human resources management.)

Thus the power/control conundrum.   The more you try to control knowledge workers, the less productive they will be.  In fact, they might work slower, make more mistakes, or be thinking more about their next jobs than the ones they have.

Here's another thing managers need to know:  Supervisors can not motivate staff.  Everyone has their own distinct set of motivations, and they will pursue what they value most.  Supervisors who want to improve the performance of their staff need to understand what they most want, and do what they are able to help workers meet their own interests.

                                                  --Leonardo Vazquez, AICP/PP

 

Do you have a professional development tip you would like to share?  Have a question that you would like to see answered here?  Please send it to Leo at vazquezl@rutgers.edu

In the 21st century, planners need a new watchword

“Let your watchword be order and your beacon beauty.” Daniel Burnham

Daniel Burnham’s biggest influence on urban planners was not in urban design but in their DNA. Burnham created the model of large, comprehensive thinking in the 1909 Plan of Chicago. And many if not most planners today focus on orderly and harmonious development.


This has brought a lot of benefit to the places we serve. When property owners know what their neighbors can do with their property, there is less risk, and property values go up. Planning that provides a clear set of goals and objectives can give stakeholders more hope about places that are unsafe and unhealthy.

But the lust for order nurtures intolerance. Anyone who makes order their watchword is going to be uncomfortable with diversity. Maybe not a diversity of land uses, because zoning maps don’t talk back at you. Tension builds when people with different perspectives, beliefs and demands share space. This tension is usually not orderly or beautiful.

But diversity is valuable, if not essential, for enhancing creativity and helping communities find better and more sustainable solutions to difficult problems. (There are a lot of scientific studies that prove this point. Start with Scott Page’s The Difference) Planners who want to help their communities succeed in the 21st century need to do better at balancing the discomfort of diversity with the demand for order.

If you read the works of Leonie Sandercock, Stacy Harwood, and the authors they reference, you’ll see how planners use racially neutral language and methods of problem solving to perpetuate structural racism and stymie innovative thinking. I believe that most planners are open-minded and welcome creativity, so I think that what we’re seeing is the impact of decades of incomplete or misguided professional training.

Oyster Bay is the latest in a long string of communities to use the “order defense” to make it more difficult for low-income Latinos to look for work there. A new ordinance prevents a pedestrian from soliciting employment while standing on a sidewalk. Of course, there is no specific language targeting Hispanics (there never is). It just happens that the people who are most affected by this are low-income Latinos. More than 90 years ago, the city of Louisville, Kentucky used the order defense to justify zoning that prevented African-Americans from buying property in white communities. (The city argued in Buchanan v. Warley that the ordinance was to protect the safety of African-Americans, who would be attacked for moving into white neighborhoods.) Burnham’s most powerful descendants, including Robert Moses, used urban renewal to clear away neighborhoods and build housing projects that looked orderly on paper but failed in real life. Even the New Urbanists display their order gene through their formulas and intolerance of urban design that doesn’t fit their romanticized visions of pre World-War II American communities. (That’s probably why a couple of New Urbanist leaders got their hats handed back to them when they tried to push a diverse area of Biloxi, Mississippi to adopt new urbanism.

Is all this the fault of planners? No. But they do often unintentionally aid and abet. And this is again a result of the order gene. By focusing on orderly practices, planners in many cases are little more than coordinators, data jockeys and glorified jacket holders for powerful interests in communities. Unable or unwilling to manage the complexity of diversity other than by avoiding it, planners in many cases squander their powers to lead.

In another essay, I wrote about how planners can more effectively work with diversity by being more culturally competent. And in that vein, I understand why Burnham placed so much emphasis on order and beauty. The industrial revolution changed American cities dramatically. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, cities got packed with huddled masses who couldn’t breathe free because of the dirty factories that polluted their communities. The nation was only a few decades away from an existential struggle over who should have what civil rights, and the White Anglo-Saxon Protestants who had for centuries ruled urban centers were understandably distressed by so many people of different colors and creeds crowding cities.

But that was then. Why is the desire for order still so entrenched in the minds of urban planners? One reason is that the public sector, being focused on the efficient delivery of services, tends to be less tolerant of risk than the private or nonprofit sector. Public administrators are trained to focus on the efficient delivery of services. That, combined with the fear of looking bad in public when mistakes are made, tend to make public sector leaders value stability and fear change. But all organizations – especially large ones – tend to become more orderly over time. It simply is more efficient and less risky to repeatedly do the same thing. Another reason is that planning school students tend to be trained by social scientists. They are the core faculty members, which means they determine what is taught and how, who gets to teach, and the culture of learning. Though scientists learn by trial and error, the ideal scientific method is orderly (and frankly, a little compulsive). So planners are trained to value order, and then they see that maintaining order is the best way to get ahead in their organizations. It’s no wonder then that the person who most changed the way planners think was a self-proclaimed ‘housewife’ with no college degree and no formal training in architecture or urban planning – Jane Jacobs.

A third reason is that humans crave order in times of change.  That desire is why relationships (even bad ones) persist, why cultural habits continue, and why charismatic individuals who offer easy solutions become leaders in times of crisis. Many planners want to serve the interests of the communities they work for, so it's natural that these planners would want to give people what they want: a sense of order.

But while order is a short-term relaxant, it makes societies vulnerable in the wake of changing conditions.  (One of the best studies of how societies fail when they fail to change is Jared Diamond's book, Collapse)

So we can understand how Burnham’s words became a part of the planner’s genetic makeup. But we know that DNA is not destiny. Planners can learn to do a better job of working with diversity while effectively promoting order. But first they have to realize their genetic makeup, question their assumptions, and develop new ways of thinking and acting.

In the 21st century, let your watchword be balance and your beacon creativity.

Leonardo Vazquez, AICP/PP