Cultivating Strategic Imagination in the Next Generation Engineering Systems Transportation Professional

Potentially the biggest failure in transportation planning is a failure of imagination. How many times have we heard, “we did not see it coming,” “it wasn’t on our radar,” “nobody could have planned for THAT?” The increasing complexity and interconnectedness of transportation systems worldwide and the connectedness of those systems with other critical infra-structure, such as telecommunications, and electricity, as well as the changing nature of land-use planning demands that the next generation transportation professional have an intellectual toolkit that is broader and more strategically oriented than today’s tactical and operational perspective. The ability to understand the complicated dynamics of transportation systems as complex, large-scale, socio-technical systems requires the cultivation of an ability to imagine the possible and understand the consequences of what sometimes are called low probability, high impact events. Although one cannot plan for every remote possibility, one does need to develop a framework for interpreting the potentially far-reaching implications of seemingly minor events and to craft strategies that can effectively respond to these possibilities. One may think of this capacity as strategic imagination. In this paper we explore scenario planning for cultivating strategic imagination and, in particular, examine the use of scenario planning as a way to enable the individual transportation professional to think more creatively and, through the incorporation of this technique into the transportation planning process, create a common medium for multiple stakeholders to think collaboratively and reflect upon the deeper connections among socio-technical systems. We report on a case study of a scenario planning exercise for the Centre Region, Centre County, Pennsylvania held in cooperation with the U. S. Department of Transportation to illustrate how scenario planning may be used to think imaginatively, but practically, of the connections between land-use and transportation. In this context, scenario planning may be seen as an effective tool to be used for strategic engineering leadership.