Strategic Planning: A Populist Approach

In my previous post, I concluded that what strategic planning needs is a more populist approach that engages more people from the organization(s) that would be implementing the plan and the public that will be affected by the plan. The question is how to do that. I think there are two answers, one involving information technology, the other narrative.

The information technology approach is to post draft plans on a government website and invite public comment. My co-author David Brown and I, in Digital State at the Leading Edge (www.digitalstate.org) discussed early initiatives of that kind undertaken by the federal and Ontario governments: for example the federal government’s dialogue on foreign policy and the Ontario government’s budget consultation, both undertaken in 2003. The challenge with such consultations is how to stimulate public participation and then how to incorporate the responses into the ultimate plan.

In the years following those early initiatives, social networking software has greatly improved, providing opportunities for enhanced outreach. So, rather than being conducted entirely on a government website, a planning process could also take place on Facebook or YouTube. If the plan involves controversial issues, it is a certainty that citizens on one side or the other will set up their own YouTube channels and Facebook groups. Again, planners in government will have to monitor, interpret, and incorporate what they read there.

I see narrative fitting in in the way strategic plans are presented. For example, plans often involve alternative scenarios. Rather than presenting scenarios abstractly, then could be presented as narratives. The narratives could include big pictures (for example, a future involving mainly renewable sources of energy) as well as vignettes involving households, businesses, or third sector organizations.

One of the issues posed in the previous post is how the strategic plans developed by forward-looking rationalist planners could deal with the limits on human rationality, for example the willingness of many people to act on the basis of backward-looking concerns such as retribution. A populist planning process will help, or perhaps I should say force, planners to take into account public sentiments, some of which may be very irrational. It would force them to confront strongly-held public sentiments either as constraints or as obstacles to be overcome through public advocacy. The example that comes to mind is Paul Krugman’s recent vignette of the citizen at a public meeting who wanted the government to keep its hands off his Medicare -willfully denying, even when told, that Medicare is a government program.

To summarize, I see online consultation, located on both government websites and social networking sites, and incorporating narrative as a way of communicating with the public, as the way forward for strategic planning.

I will be taking another week off next week, but will return during the third week of August.