I recently watched a YouTube video called Why American Cities Can’t Build Anything, and I noticed how it mirrors what I’ve experienced over the past decade as a consultant working with nonprofits and foundations.

One quote from the video especially stood out to me:

“Around the United States, cities have become trapped in an endless cycle of visioning, planning, designing, consulting, studying, and redesigning, all while struggling to build meaningful change that they set out to achieve… planning has become a substitute for action.”

Organizations often hire consultants to facilitate strategic planning, conduct evaluations, lead community engagement, facilitate listening sessions, and make sense of complex issues. These services are valuable. Organizations should take time to understand the problems they’re trying to solve before investing resources into solutions.

At what point does planning delay action?

To be fair, there are important historical reasons why planning often takes longer today than it did decades ago.

Communities have learned, often through painful experiences, what can happen when governments, planners, and developers move projects forward without community input. Those decisions have displaced entire neighborhoods. Public investments have overlooked the people most affected by them. Large institutions and corporations no longer receive the same level of unquestioned trust they once did. As a result, community engagement, public participation, and transparency have become essential parts of planning processes. That’s a good thing.

The challenge is ensuring that planning still serves its original purpose: Helping us make better decisions and move toward implementation.