A Planner's Guide

I love technology. That much should be apparent by now, but sometimes good technology goes bad. Usually it isn’t the technologies fault but the person using it. There are several ways technology can go bad. For one, the technology may not be appropriate for the situation or audience. Another common way for technology to go bad is with poor implementation of the technology, either through lack of training or time to fully implement the new technology. Often this results from not fully understanding the full cost of implementing the new technology.

On thing to keep in mind when working with any new technology is the purpose or outcome you want to achieve. Sometimes planners get so fixated on a new technology that they fail to step back and ask a very basic, very important question, “Is this the best tool for the job, given my situation?” Getting fixated on some new technology is called “shinny object syndrome” and it has affected many a good planner. Sometimes when planners have a neat new tool all they can see are new and interesting ways to use it. The old saying, “when you have a hammer everything looks like a nail”, definitely holds true here.

Recently I attended a planning meeting where key pad polling was extensively used to gather input from those present. Key pad polling allows you to poll the audience in real time, capture their responses in digital format so you don’t have to transcribe the results  and provides immediate results on the questions presented. All these features makes key pay polling an exciting technology for planning.

The meeting I attended was an example of poor implementation a technology. Since key pad polling was the primary way feedback was being gathered there were quite a lot of questions. The problem was that too much time was given answering and explaining the results of each question. As a result, it dramatically slowed down the pace of the meeting. The questions used were at times confusing and too complicated. I also think that the sheer number of questions lead to participation fatigue, with the response rate dropping by almost a quarter by the end of the meeting. Key pad polling is a power and very useful technology but in this case the planners were too dazzled with the technology to see that they were overusing it.

Here are some of the questions I ask myself when considering any new technology.

1. What problem do I want to solve with the technology?
2. How does the solution new technology offers compare to how I currently address the problem?
3. What is required to use the technology (training, funding, additional software)?
4. How does the cost of using the technology compare to how I currently address the problem?
5. Considering the above questions, is the technology the best tool for the job?

So how about you? Do you sometimes fall prey to shiny object syndrome? I know I constantly have to battle the syndrome, thankfully the above questions help to keep things in perspective.