Good planning begins with better listening

This article is part of a regular column by Chicago-based transit planner extraordinaire Joshua Woods, who authors Thoughts About Cities. Check out his popular 2025 series, Transit Planning 101, and its follow-up sibling, Transit Scheduling 101. 

If you're itching for more explicitly transit-oriented content, rest assured. I'll be back this fall with Transit Planning 201. Paratransit, network design, trains and ferries are all topics I'm excited to explore. Until then, summer always feels like the right time to step back and think about broader questions in urban planning between visits to Lollapalooza, neighborhood street festivals and Chicago's concrete beaches. Whether you're a planner, advocate or simply curious about the world around you, I hope you'll find something here that resonates. Take what helps. Leave what doesn't. 

When I was in grad school, one question that vexed me and my colleagues was: 

How do we do public engagement? 

Engaging the public meaningfully and establishing consensus from those meetings is a necessary step in the planning process. In transit planning, there are often several correct answers for how to provide service to a place. Meaningful public engagement helps ensure the public is actually interested in riding whatever version of transit service you’re offering them. 

Still, capturing the diversity of thoughts and feelings held in a community about a change and attempting to synthesize them into one cohesive plan that at least makes people feel heard is not a small task. A formative moment for me as an urban planner was when I realized the TV show Parks and Recreation wasn’t exaggerating in this clip:

Beyond some structural changes to the engagement process itself, doing public engagement well requires emotionally intelligent practitioners, capable of understanding that the person yelling at you about the bus probably isn’t really yelling at you. 

A perennial refresher on emotional intelligence

I know, I know, we’ve all heard about emotional intelligence. Still, isn’t it wild how many people say they understand emotional intelligence without ever showing it off, even occasionally?

Emotional Intelligence (n) - The ability to understand and manage your own emotions while recognizing and responding thoughtfully to the emotions, perspectives and needs of others. 

Emotionally intelligent practitioners understand that the person yelling likely has some sincere concern or uncertainty around the change presented (or with the service itself), and you are the most accessible representative of the organization at the moment. If you can develop the skills to traverse these interactions, you’ll be equipped to transition difficult conversations into learning conversations where the goal is mutual understanding, if not mutual agreement.  

Fortunately for all of us, the skills and competencies required for strong emotional intelligence are all learned personal skills. We all have the capacity to build our emotional intelligence. Like any learned skill, emotional intelligence requires practice. I become a pretty crummy saxophone player if I go a few months without touching the instrument. 

Psychologist Daniel Goleman organizes emotional intelligence into four domains:

1. Self Awareness - An understanding of your own feelings and emotions and how they influence your behavior
2. Self Management - The ability to manage those feelings when they present themselves
3. Social Awareness - Empathy. The capacity to know and care about the feelings of others
4. Relationship Management - The ability to successfully manage conflict

Under each of these domains, he lists individual skills like emotional regulation that reinforce each domain. 

While Goleman's framework focuses on emotional intelligence broadly, "Emotionally Intelligent Leadership" by Shankman, Allen and Haber-Curran applies many of the same ideas to leadership, emphasizing three interconnected forms of awareness: consciousness of self, consciousness of others and consciousness of context. 

• Consciousness of self involves being aware of your emotions and self-perceptions and ensuring they don’t negatively impact how you engage with the people you’re responsible for leading. Relevant skills: Emotional self-control, flexibility, authenticity.

• Consciousness of others involves taking the elements of consciousness of self and remembering that people are people. A version of all of the complex emotions, feelings and self-assessments that you discovered in developing your consciousness of self exist in some form in the people you’re leading and engaging with. Relevant skills: Empathy, managing conflict.

• Consciousness of context involves recognizing the group dynamics at play and factoring them into how you engage with those you lead. It also means recognizing when the context might not produce the best outcomes.

The authors assert that this framework applies to positions of formal and informal leadership, and that the emotionally intelligent leader works on all three consciousnesses. Similar to Goleman, the book asserts that these consciousnesses build upon each other. For example, it is difficult to have a strong consciousness of others without a solid consciousness of self. For one looking to develop these consciousnesses, the book details several capacities that must be curated to hone that consciousness. 

In the earlier video, Daniel Goleman referred to "poor listening" as the common cold of emotional intelligence. This echoes themes in "Emotionally Intelligent Leadership," as well as "Difficult Conversations." Listening, a foundational element of emotional intelligence, is also a skill that can atrophy without training. 

A reading list for active listening

A few years ago, I realized I’d gotten to be a pretty bad listener. My biggest obstacle was (and sometimes still is) getting excited about a thought before the other person finishes speaking. Before I knew it, I'd interrupt them and completely derail the conversation. 

Fortunately, my husband completed a certificate in Collaborative Leadership while we were both at Purdue, and unlike me, he actually bought his books. That act of foresight gave me a ready-made reading list, and over the past few years these books have had an outsized influence on how I think about communication, emotional intelligence and leadership: 

• "Difficult Conversations" by Stone, Patton and Heen
• "Emotionally Intelligent Leadership" by Shankman, Allen and Haber-Curran

Here are a few other books I’ve picked up along the way that echo the themes of emotional intelligence:

• "The Librarian’s Guide To Homelessness" by Ryan J. Dowd
• "Messy Cities: Why We Can’t Plan Everything" by Reid, Ebrahim, Woo and Lorinc 
• "Reset: How to Change What’s Not Working" by Dan Heath

Over the course of my journey to become a better listener, I’ve noticed several skills I have to re-remind myself of. Here are reminders I find myself repeating a lot:

• 👂🏽Listen to understand, don’t just wait to respond. Once you start waiting to respond, the odds of you interrupting increase because you’re just waiting for a gap to make your point. What if the most valuable nugget comes after you stop listening and start waiting?

• 👂🏽 Don't worry about forgetting your point. If it's truly important, it'll come back. Giving someone your full attention is almost always more valuable than delivering the perfect response. 

One of the best ways I've found to become a better listener is simply to expose myself to more ideas and more perspectives. Public engagement asks planners to do exactly that: to genuinely understand people whose experiences and priorities may differ from our own. Emotional intelligence provides a framework for developing the skills to do this work. The encouraging part is that none of us are born with or without emotional intelligence. Like any other skill, it can be learned, practiced, neglected and strengthened again. The work is never really finished — and that's probably a good thing. Like anything else, emotional intelligence must be constantly learned and relearned.