Planning Rule Development Process

This is the last in a series of posts about assessments for Forest/Grassland plan revisions under the proposed Forest Service planning rule.  The posts are a summary of this working draft of the asssessment process.  In previous posts, Part 1 described some suggestions about how the assessment process would focus on a series of questions derived from the rule.  Part 2 talked about the analysis and deliberation steps.  Part 3 described futuring and scenario planning.

Before revising a Forest Service plan, the proposed planning rule requires an assessment – both a product (the document), and a participatory process (deliberation and analysis).  There are three important outcomes of the assessment process:

• It can provide baseline information for looking at the effects of a Forest Plan.
• It can provide actionable knowledge about the need to change the Forest Plan.
• As part of a broader adaptive governance framework, it can foster collaborative learning, especially when there is no agreement on the problems or solutions.

The assessment sets the stage for the subsequent proposed plan, an Environmental Impact Statement (EIS), and the who, what, when, where, why and how for the NEPA process.  The interplay between the assessment document and the EIS is of particular interest.  As a comprehensive look at the planning rule requirements, the assessment would look at the current plan and serve as a screening process for an EIS.  This would simplify the EIS since it would only need to focus on those requirements that the current plan isn’t expected to meet.  The assessment could also essentially become the “affected environment” chapter of the EIS. 

Several points need emphasis.  First, the topics covered in an assessment are at the scale of the Forest Plan decision under NFMA and its implementing rule.  The level of detail required to develop a Forest Plan is less specific than resource planning (like fire planning or forest-wide recreation planning) or project planning.  Second, an assessment is time sensitive.  It provides information for the subsequent plan revision and EIS.  The rule assumes a more or less continuous cycle of assessment, plan revision or amendment, and monitoring.  An assessment is a time step for those issues that are ripe for discussion.

“Actionable knowledge,” as researcher Chris Argyris has written in his 1993 book, “is not only relevant to the world of practice, it is the knowledge that people use to create that world”.   A forest plan assessment needs to provide information about what needs to be changed in the forest plan, and how those changes should be made.  An assessment shouldn’t merely be a compilation of “descriptive” facts about a forest.  The descriptive facts should be connected together in the context of the assessment questions and the experience and judgment of the participants.  We might know that there are 10,000 acres of dead trees in a forest.  But just knowing that there are dead trees doesn’t compel us to act.  However, if we have Forest Service employees, scientists, local residents, or others with experience about disease agents and how they might spread, within the context of a specific assessment question about wildlife habitat or timber salvage markets, we now have actionable knowledge that can inform how the forest plan might be changed. 

Argyris has said that actionable knowledge includes a deliberate, intentional search for error, understood as a mismatch between either intentions or assumptions and outcomes.  In a sense, these errors are surprises that we didn’t know about or think about when we wrote the original plan.  The whole idea of actionable knowledge is about having a reasonable process that facilitates timely recognition of likely, yet unpredictable surprises so that less costy actions are possible in response.  Actionable knowledge is about looking to learn, instead of assuming that what we think we know during a planning process will always be the case as we move forward.  The context in which we manage these public lands is just too dynamic for such assumptions.

An important theme of the planning process in the proposed rule is learning:

This new framework is science-based and would provide a blueprint for the land management process, creating a structure within which land managers and partners could work together to understand what is happening on the land, revise management plans to respond to existing and predicted conditions and needs, and monitor changing conditions and the effectiveness of management actions to provide a continuous feedback loop for adaptive management.” Federal Register p. 8487

Ideally, for adaptive management to work, learning objectives should be explicitly stated and incorporated into the objectives of the forest plan, with monitoring questions and indicators all tied to those objectives.  The proposed rule requires the identification of monitoring questions and indicators as part of the assessment process.  So it beomes important that participants use the assessment process by formally asking what they want to learn and why.

Elsewhere on this blog, we’ve discussed the need for the Forest Service to establish an adaptive governance framework, and some of the basic principles.  As part of that broader framework, the forest plan assessment process can be used to engage stakeholders and allow participants to invest in the planning process.  Without such an investment, we will not reach that basic standard of collaboration—are stakeholders, including the Forest Service, willing to live with the proposed changes?  Failing to reach that basic standard reduces the willingness to help get the job done and increases the willingness to challenge the decision administratively, legally, or through civil disobedience, such as ignoring new management rules. 

The assessment process will require a capacity to collaborate.  Based on a study of forest plan revision efforts, Sam Burns and Tony Cheng have developed six essential prerequisites for utilizing a collaborative process:

Is the Forest Service staff aware of collaboration ideas and principles?

Is there an understanding of the social and historical context for collaboration in the planning locale, including community understanding of collaboration and related collaborative capacities?

Is there internal capacity to do collaboration?

Are there clear collaborative expectations?

Are there ways to monitor and adapt the planning process?

Is there a design for how the collaborative process will work?

A collaborative learning process is essential because forest planning often behaves as a classic example of a wicked problem, where there is no definitive statement of the problem, and hence there can be no definitive solution.  (See for instance Salwasser’s description of the Sierra Forest Plan amendments).  The forest planning process will involve fragmented stakeholders, high-uncertainty, disagreement about the role of science, political engagement, and an ebbing and flowing of Forest Supervisor control.  As the assessment process goes through the iterations of deliberation and analysis, The Forest Supervisor should determine if it still helping define the problem, or still building relationships and capacity for subsequent planning and project work.  There will be no easy rules of thumb for when the end the assessment process.  There are no “right” answers for many of the assessment questions.  The proposed planning rule gives some flexibility by allowing the assessment process to overlap with the revision and NEPA process.  It also gives the Forest Supervisor the discretion on when to end the process.  Hopefully, the Forest Supervisor has communicated early in the process how she/he will decide when to end the process, participants shouldn’t be surprised when management intervention is taken.

The design and implementation of the assessment process needs to have its end in mind.  It’s about convening, exploring and learning, in order to act and move ahead.  Ultimately it’s not about a plan, it’s about implementing a plan.  But you can’t implement until you know what you’re doing.  You also can’t implement a plan without support of those affected it.  A well designed assessment process can improve the final plan document, provide a fair process for the participants, and foster relationships with people that can later help implement the plan.   So let’s begin.

What is the future of our National Forests?  How do we fulfill NFMA’s challenge to plan for sustained yield of products and services into the future?   

In the messy world of forest planning, there are demands for certainty and assurances about the future, so subsequent project work can be done.  Planners have responded with deterministic linear programming models, reasonably foreseeable development forecasts, ranges of historic variation, or simply promises.  If uncertainty remains, there is a promise to monitor, and to eventually adapt.  Sometimes these approaches have worked, often they haven’t.  

The challenge of the proposed planning rule is to assess present and potential future conditions in order to plan for them.  In previous posts, I offered suggestions to review assessment questions derived from the rule through an interactive process using analysis and deliberation.  If Forest Plans are to be strategic and guide projects from one decade to the next, they must be able to address an uncertain world.  However, the appearance of certainty comes at a price, both in the cost of the plan’s preparation, and its reliability.  One thing becomes clear: forest planning should not try to reduce uncertainty – instead, it should embrace uncertainty.

One approach to addressing uncertainty is to set up adaptive management.  You establish a hypothesis, then test it through monitoring and evaluation.  But adaptive management only works when the Forest Service is in control of the forces affecting the forest.  For uncertainty that can’t be controlled, a better approach is to develop a plan that is robust and flexible to respond to the unexpected problems that “walk into the District Ranger’s door”, or to address the uncertain events that the proposed planning rule calls “drivers, stressors, and disturbances” or “risks”.

Nimble, flexible planning requires some awareness of blind spots and assumptions about the future.  It requires a look at alternative futures.  In order to break out of people’s comfort zones, it’s important to offer stories with impact, that create a future shock.   These are the elements of scenario planning, or what is sometimes referred to as scenario thinking.  Scenario planning is a structured framework to identify actions that will be most effective across a range of potential futures to promote desired outcomes. Peterson, et. al. has described how scenario planning is useful in natural resource planning where there is high uncertainty and minimal control.  The Park Service is applying scenario planning for addressing climate change in park planning.

Applied to the Forest Plan assessment process, scenario planning would include the following steps:

• In answering the assessment questions, find out what scientists know, think they know, and don’t know.
• For the things that we don’t know, find out what are the most critical forces that affect the answers to the assessment questions.
• Combine the most critical forces into different stories about how the future will play out.
• Think about what should be in the forest plan to respond to the various scenarios.
• Determine what important monitoring questions and indicators are important to see what scenarios may unfold.

Scenario planning focuses on multiple, reasonably plausible futures.  While these multiple futures can be thought of as analogous to multiple forecasts, true scenario planning seeks to describe multiple plausible futures.  Scenario planning does not seek to establish probabilities associated with those futures.  The emphasis on plausibility instead of probability is overlooked by some disciplines that have embraced the terminology of scenarios without understanding the origins of scenario planning.  Emphasis on probabilities reinforces a problematic search for a single best answer (see for instance, Mitroff and Lindstrom or Van der Heijden), a problem the founders of scenario planning sought to address (wikepedia link).

This difference between emphasizing plausibility and emphasizing probability creates a need to develop new Forest Service skills, because those trained in natural resource sciences are taught about probabilistic methods.  Some of the new skills needed require rethinking fundamental training, which is especially challenging.

The main goal of scenario thinking is to question basic assumptions about how the world works and to open people’s minds about possible futures that would otherwise be unimaginable.  Participants can break out of their standard worldview, exposing blind spots that would otherwise be overlooked in the generally accepted forecast.  It’s then easier to recognize a scenario in its earliest stages, should it actually be the one that unfolds.  The Forest Supervisor is also better able to understand the source of disagreement that often occurs when different people are envisioning different scenarios without realizing it.

Collaboration is central to scenario planning – engagement that includes but is not limited to that of technical experts and scientists.  This engagement is a scientifically valid method of bringing biases and assumptions to the surface and then using those to construct plausible alternative futures.  In contrast, traditional approaches to forest planning typically pit competing perspectives against each other in search for a single best forecast or scenario, occasionally looking for multiple single-point forecasts.  Chermack and Lynham explain that the search for a single best forecast makes traditional methods fundamentally adversarial, and therefore at odds with more collaborative, learning-oriented approaches to planning and decision-making.

Like most planning methods, there are some cautions with scenarios.  We’ve talked about Mintzberg’s classic book on this blog, and Mintzberg (p. 248) mentions the balancing act between developing enough scenarios and hitting the manager’s mental capacity.  He says that “hedging or remaining flexible has its own costs, primarily in the lack of commitment to a clear strategy.”  Plus, even when the planners are quite sure that one of their scenarios is on the right track, there remains the problem of convincing management to do something about it.   Still, despite Mintzberg’s and other commentors’ concerns, scenario planning is useful to begin a dialogue, to blend the “hard” analysis with a manger’s “soft” intuition, and engage the public.

Properly done, an assessment under the proposed planning rule should challenge the conventional wisdom and contribute to the learning of all participants.   That might be the greatest benefit of NFMA planning.

In an earlier post I offered some ideas for doing an assessment under the proposed Forest Service planning rule.  The essential purpose of the assessment would be to review assessment questions derived from the rule to determine what in the Forest Plan needs to change for the Revision.

In order to assess the relevant conditions of a forest, or the risks to a forest, two activities are often described in the planning literature: deliberation and analysis.  (See for instance the National Research Council’s guide to risk assessment.)  These two activities can be thought of as complementary approaches to gaining knowledge about the world.  Analysis uses rigorous, replicable methods to arrive at answers to factual questions.  Deliberation is any formal or informal process for communication and collective consideration of issues.  Together, the combination of deliberation and analysis serves as the synthesis process, required for assessments in the proposed planning rule (see definition at 219.19).

The Deliberative Democracy Consortium defines deliberation as an approach to decision-making in which citizens consider relevant facts from multiple points of view, converse with one another to think critically about options before them and enlarge their perspectives, opinions, and understandings.  Deliberative democracy strengthens citizen voices in governance by including people of all races, classes, ages and geographies in deliberations that directly affect public decisions.  As a result, a citizen influences – and can see the results of that influence on – the policy and resource decisions that affect their daily lives and their future.

The assessment process would contain analysis and deliberation steps, but the process itself must be designed collaboratively by the participants.  The principal reason is that the participants should have sufficient ownership in the process.  If participants have ownership in the process, they will see it as fair, and therefore willing to live with the eventual outcomes.  The steps and the sequence should be agreed upon by the participants at the beginning of the process.  The Forest Supervisor needs to be fully engaged, explaining to the participants the sideboards for the process, and that she/he will retain the discretion to determine the scope, scale and timing of the assessment (proposed planning rule at 219.6)

David Straus has described in his book How to Make Collaboration Work (amazon link) that a flowchart of the steps of a collaboration process might look like an “accordion”.  For a plan assessment, here’s what it might look like.

There are cycles between deliberation activities and analysis activities.  There are also cycles between large group activities and small group activities.  Each cycle refines the answers to the assessment questions, and may bring in new participants and new sources of knowledge.  The flow chart expands with concurrent activities, then contracts into deliberative meetings, then expands again, hence the description as an “accordion process.”

Again, the focus of deliberation and analysis would be answering the assessment questions.  One of the first questions on the list relate to the values that participants place on a National Forest, and what roles and contributions they see the forest providing now and into the future. 

One approach that can be applied is David Cooperrider’s appreciative inquiry methodology.  This process moves from (1) discovering what works well in the current forest management situation; (2) envisioning what might work well in the future; (3) designing, planning and prioritizing what would work well; and (4) executing the proposed design.

Another key step is looking into the future.  The next post describes the potential role of scenario planning in the assessment process.