Strategic Planning in Municipal Government: A Tool for Expanding Cooperative Decision Making between Elected and Appointed Officials

Abstract

Unanticipated advantages sometime accrue from least-expected nooks and crannies. The author has had the pleasant and serendipitous experience of catching monster cutthroat trout in the Rockies on dry flies designed for coaxing brook trout in small meadow streams. In working with many city councils as a strategic planning facilitator, ostensibly for the purpose of developing a strategic plan, a major side benefit, indeed perhaps the most important and unanticipated result, has been the cultivation of cooperative decision-making norms between elected and appointed officials. Deriving this benefit may not be the intended purpose of strategic planning exercises, but in the end it serves as an outcome many participants solicitously point to as the most significant thing that happens. Why bring this observation up? A common complaint against strategic planning is that strategic plans never get carried out in practice. Halachmi (199la) argues that the rationalistic premises undergirding strategic planning conflict with the incrementalist characteristics of most governmental budgeting processes. If they are not integrated with an agency's budget, few strategic plans have much chance of achieving fruition. It is also unclear how strategic planning will directly improve public sector productivity (Halachmi, 1991b). Most managers want to see tangible benefits streaming from the technology their organizations employ. Without this demonstrable productivity connection, public agencies may perceive strategic planning as just one more fad that sounds attractive but exerts only a nominal effect on overall performance.