New Paradigm is about a new way of doing planning – more collaborative, more inclusive, and more transparent – for more lasting plans built on consensus.

Planning is preparing for the future.  If we knew the future, we wouldn’t need planners. But the uncertainty of the next few months, years or decades makes us need to plan. 

The traditional paradigm of planning sometimes is too top down – start with a small group of people, develop a plan and distribute it down to larger and larger groups – the public – and then work to defend it.  In this process, decisions flow from the top to the base, and the result is often a plan that doesn’t have support or last very long.  The better paradigm starts with planning from the bottom up – building from a base of wide public input and letting the consensus inform the leadership at the top. While elected leaders still need to do what they were elected to do – make tough decisions, the stronger the base of public support, the easier their decisions become.

For those starting to plan, this takes an amount of humility and openness to what will emerge and a commitment to trusting the process without knowing the outcome.  For a consultant facilitating the planning process, it takes honesty, transparency, and the same degree of humility to design a process without a predetermined outcome.