Community, Not Customers

By Vaney Hariri, Founder, Think 3D

A few weeks ago I stood in front of a room full of planners at the 2026 SDPA / Western Planner / Tribal & Indigenous Joint Conference in Sioux Falls, SD and asked a simple question: do you have a community, or do you have a community of customers? The room went quiet in the way rooms go quiet when a question lands somewhere real. That question, and the framework behind it, is the reason I'm writing this follow-up.

I want to be careful about what this piece is and isn't. This isn't an argument about what elected officials or administrators are doing wrong. Most of the friction planners feel in the public process isn't the result of bad intent on anyone's part. It's the result of inherited processes — systems built for a different era, a different scale, a different level of trust — that we're all still operating inside of, and that don't always serve the people asked to use them. That includes planners. That includes residents. Naming that clearly, without pointing fingers, is where I think the real work starts.

The distinction that changed the room

Here's the distinction I offered: a customer is entitled to an outcome and indifferent to the process. A community member is invested in the process, with expectations matched to means. Customer mentality says, "I want what I want, when I want it, for whatever I'm willing to pay, and I assume I'm right." The community mentality says something closer to, "we're better together — it takes a village, and everyone plays a part."

Without that shift, public engagement stays antagonistic by default. It “others” the planner — turns them into a vendor selling a product, instead of a fellow resident helping shape an environment they live in too. And I heard from a lot of people after that session that the antagonism runs both ways: residents feel bullied by a process they never had a hand in shaping, and planners feel bullied by residents who show up only to extract a concession, not to build anything alongside them. Nobody in that exchange is wrong to feel what they feel. But nobody wins it, either.

The anchor line I used, and the one people quoted back to me most in the days after: “it's not them. It's us.”

Standing in the fire without standing alone

None of this means absorbing every complaint at a podium and calling it engagement. Community, done honestly, isn't a posture of agreement — it's a posture of presence. It means being willing to stand in front of the room, take the heat that's genuinely earned, and also push back where pushing back is warranted. It means challenging your community as much as you serve it: asking more of people, not just asking them what they want. That's uncomfortable in both directions, and it should be. Comfort was never the goal. Trust was.

That's also why good feedback and good process matter as much as good intentions. Criticism just communicates a feeling — it doesn't have to be useful, and often isn't. Feedback is directional: it asks something of the person receiving it, and it has to be delivered in a way that gives them an actual chance to use it. If we want communities capable of giving planners better feedback than "this is wrong," we have to build the muscle for it — on both sides of the table.

Extraction, education, experience

In practice, I've come to think of genuine engagement as three things happening at once, not in sequence: extraction, education, and experience.

Extraction is the part planners already do fairly well — gathering public input, but not always closing the feedback loop, and making sure people who show up hear back. Education is the part we underinvest in — actively building civic and planning literacy in the people we're asking to weigh in, so their input is as informed as our expertise. And experience is the part that ties it together: people don't just need a seat at the table, they need to leave the room having learned something, practiced something, or built something — not just been heard and sent home. Skip any one of the three, and you get a version of engagement that either extracts without giving back, educates without ever asking, or offers experience with no substance underneath it.

That third piece — experience — is where I think most public processes quietly fail. We collect comments. We hold hearings. We rarely leave people more capable than we found them. A community that gains capacity from participating in planning is a community that shows up as a partner next time, instead of a plaintiff.

What's realistic right now

I want to be honest about scale. Most of us aren't going to redesign our public process this year. Budgets are tight, staff are stretched, and trust in institutions generally is not exactly trending up right now. But the community-versus-customer distinction doesn't require a new department or a new dollar to start applying. It requires a decision, made and re-made in every meeting, about which posture you're bringing into the room — and which posture you're inviting the public to meet you in.

Here in Sioux Falls, we're testing this at a real scale right now through work tied to the Sanford District redevelopment and a handful of parallel civic efforts — not because we've solved it, but because we're in the middle of trying, in public, with the stakes as real as they get. I don't have a finished model to hand you. What I have is a distinction that changed how a room of planners talked to each other for an afternoon, and a genuine belief that the same shift is available anywhere planners are willing to say, out loud, to the people they serve: this is not our plan for you. This is our community, and you're already in it.

Communities don't succeed or fail based on what we build. They succeed or fail based on who we build up. Whatever we're planning, it's for people. People are the point.

About the Author

Vaney Hariri is the Co-founder of Think 3D, a culture strategy and leadership development practice based in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. He serves on multiple city task forces and boards, including the Sanford District Advisory Task Force and the Sioux Falls Arts Commission, and leads Leaders of Tomorrow, a leadership development program. He was a keynote speaker and plenary host at the 2026 SDPA / Western Planner / Tribal & Indigenous Joint Conference in Sioux Falls. Learn more at letsthink3d.com and vaneyhariri.com.