State Agencies' Experience with Strategic Planning: Findings from a National Survey

Since the early 1980s, strategic planning has been one of the "hot" innovations in public administration, promising public agencies the benefits of a rational and highly structured, future-oriented management technique borrowed from the best run private sector companies. Despite some critical assessments (e.g., Bryson & Roering, 1987; Halachmi, 1986; Mintzberg, (1994),[1] an outpouring of books and articles advocate strategic planning as an effective tool for improving organizational decision making and program performance in government (Behn, 1980; Bryson, 1988; Eadie, 1983; Nutt & Backoff, 1992; Olsen & Eadie, 1982; Wechsler & Backoff, 1986; Meising & Andersen, 1991). Strategic planning is defined as a systematic process for managing the organization and its future direction in relation to its environment and the demands of external stakeholders, including strategy formulation, analysis of agency strengths and weaknesses, identification of agency stakeholders, implementation of strategic actions, and issue management. Increasing numbers of government agencies are reported as having adopted some form of strategic planning (Wechsler, 1989). Like many public sector management innovations of the past, strategic planning seems to have been greeted by a high level of initial enthusiasm. There has been, however, little research measuring the extent to which strategic planning is actually used by governments, the nature of the methods and processes used in different agencies, the reasons agencies give for initiating strategic planning, their objectives for the planning process, or the outcomes they believe they have achieved. To remedy this lack of data and to provide answers to questions about the use of strategic planning in the public sector, we conducted a national study of strategic planning in state government.[2] We chose to conduct this study at the level of state government for several reasons, including the increasing importance of the states in the delivery of public services, the relative diversity of state agencies and their tractability as units of analysis when compared to the federal and local levels, and the great interest reported in strategic planning among state governments (Wechsler, 1989). Survey Results Extent of Utilization of Strategic Planning by States Most of the survey respondents (60 percent) reported that they currently use strategic planning in their agency, while 9 percent of the agencies planned to start strategic planning soon, but had not yet initiated it. Twenty-six percent of respondents said their agency had never used strategic planning and had no plans to use it, and about 5 percent of the respondents reported their agency had used strategic planning in the past but currently did not. The primary reason even for discontinuing strategic planning was a change in agency leadership. Other reasons included budgetary cutbacks and personnel changes in planning positions. Only two respondents said that planning was discontinued because it was perceived as a failure in the agency. While we are somewhat surprised both by the high utilization rate and by the low discontinuance rate, there are two plausible explanations for these findings. First, agencies not using strategic planning could be underrepresented in the survey. (In fact, where we have responses for an agency-type from every state, the utilization rate is somewhat lower.) Second, because the large majority of agencies have had fewer than five years of experience with strategic planning, the discontinuance rate is likely to increase in the future, as agencies have more experience and some get discouraged or as leadership changes occur. Despite the longevity of strategic planning practice in the private sector (Bracker, 1980), there is little evidence of extensive public sector use of strategic planning or references to strategic planning in the public administration literature before the 1980s (Behn, 1980; Olsen & Eadie, 1982; Walters & Choate, 1984). …