Here's how you can learn from your failures to advance as a transportation planner.

As a transportation planner, learning from failures is crucial for improvement. Some common failures might include underestimating traffic flow, not considering community input enough, or implementing solutions without considering long-term impacts. Reflecting on these failures helps refine future plans, ensuring better outcomes and more sustainable transportation systems.

Reflect on what went wrong : Will take time to analyse the project or initiative that failed, Will identify the specific issues, challenges, and mistakes that led to the failure and after pointing out the issue, i will share my failure with colleagues, peers, and seniors. This can help others learn from my mistakes and avoid similar failures.

Wrong decisions were not intentional. Rather, they were the best decisions made with the best available information at that time. To properly learn from wrong desicions, you must be prepare now and document details associated with critical elements so you don't rely on memory that quickly fades and/or gets confused. Document details regarding Who? What? When? Why? Where? associated with major elements in an organized fashion using routinely available tools, such as memos, spreadsheets, maps, etc. that will provide you with needed details of that time that can be analyzed and critiqued to understand what should be done in the future. Being prepared for failure will help you learn to embrace it, and vice versa.

As a transportation planner, it's important to view failure as an opportunity for growth and learning. Instead of being discouraged by failures, embrace them as valuable experiences that can provide insights into what went wrong and how to improve.

After experiencing a failure, take the time to thoroughly analyze the outcomes. Identify the specific factors that led to the failure and examine the root causes. This analysis will help you gain a deeper understanding of what went wrong and enable you to make more informed decisions in the future.

Feedback is vital for planning projects. Feedback must be sought from stakeholders at several intermediate stages of the project. Feedback will ensure that all individually isolated tasks merge into the accomplishment of a single big task effortlessly. Diverse perspectives and experiences enrich a project's holistic vision.

Actively seek feedback from stakeholders, colleagues, and experts in the field. Their perspectives can provide valuable insights and different viewpoints that can help identify blind spots or alternative approaches that may have been missed. Be open to constructive criticism and use it as a catalyst for improvement.

The Strategies made at the start of a project may need several upgradation cycles along the course of the project. Keep an open mind to be involved in regular upgrades and evolve the strategy based on project and client response. Also, look out for inspiration from the lessons of similar projects done by your peers and colleagues.

Based on the analysis and feedback received, it's important to adjust your strategies and approaches accordingly. Identify areas that need improvement and develop new strategies or modify existing ones to address the shortcomings. This adaptive approach allows you to refine your planning methods and make more effective decisions.

Once the adjustments to your strategies have been identified, it's crucial to implement these changes in practice. This may involve revising transportation plans, policies, or procedures to incorporate the lessons learned from failures. By actively implementing changes, you can ensure that the improvements are put into action and have tangible effects.