By Kel Wang
Estimated reading time: 11 minutes
The article was originally published in the April 2022 Issue, Public Management magazine of International City/County Management association.
You (or your staff – for simplicity, I will keep using “you” for the rest of the article) were tasked to lead the strategic planning effort. Your community just had an election and elected a few new faces. To address the long-term development of the community while orienting new members, you wanted to hire a facilitator to develop the strategic plan, including developing the mission and vision statements, as well as values. The work was done with elected officials and subsequently endorsed by them. The plan was clear and succinct, and everyone felt they had a good conversation. What could possibly go wrong?
I am sure you may have experienced or witnessed this already. When you start to work with department staff to identify key actions and performance indicators, there is generally a lack of familiarity and ownership. They are instrumental in identifying specific tasks and timelines, but they may not necessarily see the connection to the strategic plan. You get the feeling that they think they are helping you complete the strategic planning work, rather than providing insight into the plan and fulfilling their role in this process.
When you provide a progress update, you may find that if selected indicators are not performing, people generally criticize the selection of indicators and attention is shifted away from managing the performance and getting things done. As a result, the implementation of the strategic plan becomes quite challenging and may lose momentum over time. The aforementioned issue is what I call imagining without reasoning—when the strategic planning effort is very much focused on envisioning an ideal future, not on rationalizing the future, at least sufficiently. There are a couple of symptoms that go along with this issue:
- Unattainable goals. Goals are set and projects are aligned to goals, but the organization lacks the means to make and demonstrate the impact.
- Limited staff engagement and buy-in. Many see strategic planning as a leadership function, so the development of the strategic plan only involves elected officials and leaders of the organization.
- Treating the work as the project of the year. The development and approval, implementation, and finance of the plan are separated into three distinct projects. The development and approval often doesn’t consider the implementation and budget implications.
What may have gone wrong? In an earlier article, I talked about the four factors that define public strategy, and we have to consider those factors as we develop a strategic plan or any single-issue based strategy. Imagining without reasoning is a good example of when those factors are not addressed. So, how do we plan differently?
- Initiation
Way too often, we begin to create the strategy because it is required by law, the current plan is up for renewal, or other communities have one so it may make sense for us to have one as well. But if the strategic issue(s) your strategy is set to address aren’t clear, then it will be challenging for elected officials to set a clear direction—and for staff and other stakeholders to understand the reason for this work. How could we initiate the strategy properly?
According to the Harvard Policy Model, organizational success is contingent on the fit with its environment. Central to this model is the understanding of the strengths and weaknesses within the organization and the opportunities and threats outside the organization (known as the SWOT analysis). This understanding helps inform strategic issues. The key to proper initiation lies to the quality of the SWOT analysis.
The starting point of a quality SWOT analysis often contains a comprehensive external and internal scan. We search the external environment in political, economic, social, technological, legal/legislative, and environmental domains. Within each domain, we look for factors and trends affecting community or customers’ preference as related to our work in the long term, as well as factors and trends affecting the organization’s ability to meet the community or customers’ expectation in the long term. The internal scan would look for factors affecting the organizational culture, human resources in terms of employee development and training, recruitment and succession planning, financial management, and the organization’s IT infrastructure.
Ideally, the process would involve various levels of the organization (external stakeholders, if possible) because each offers their unique perspectives. The result of this analysis will lead to the identification of strategic issues that represent the fundamental policy choices a public organization has to make within its mandate. It is also the opportunity to make a difference for the community.
With strategic issues, you have evidence that informs the strategy development. It is important to start your strategic planning effort through this step because collectively elected officials have to represent diverse groups, interests, and opinions, not to mention each of them has their own background, experience, understanding, and perception of the issue. Without the common basis, confusion and division may take the conversation away from the issue itself; not to mention the clarity of the direction will be limited, both of which will ultimately affect the implementation of the strategy.
- Reasoning Components
An implementation-friendly strategy should include outcomes, key actions, a set of performance indicators, and a resourcing plan, which are what I call reasoning components of public strategy – components that help rationalize the future state.
One of the core activities of strategic planning is to set the vision and goals. The idea is to imagine the future state and highlight areas for change. But the vision and goals together may not provide enough information for implementation. For example, if your vision is to become a connected, accessible, and vibrant city by 2035, then one of your goals would cascade from the vision and highlight what a connected (or accessible, or vibrant) city looks like. Let’s just say one of the goals is the city of Pandora is an accessible city in its amenities, transportation system, infrastructure, and services. Your elected officials would like the administration to focus its effort on improving these areas. Take the transportation system as an example. What does improved accessibility in the transportation system look like: have access in all seasons? Stations and stops are within walking distance? Allow access to vulnerable populations (especially those with mobility challenges)? Focus on road maintenance? You get the idea. It is open for interpretation. Therefore, we need further information to clarify the direction and that’s why outcomes are important. An outcome is a detailed description of the change. It tends to have three components:
- How – maintain, eliminate, decrease, increase, or create.
- What – the subject or service area.
- Who – the targeted group (the entire population by default).
One of your outcomes could be to maintain access to public transit in all seasons or to eliminate accessibility barriers for individuals with mobility challenges. Then you will need to identify key actions to address the key attributes that lead to accessible public transit and in all seasons. To monitor progress toward this outcome, you will need a series of key performance indicators that track the results of key actions on each key attribute. For example, if the reliability of on-time bus schedule adherence matters, then one key indicator could be the percentage of buses that are on schedule. The focus of the work would be getting buses on time and on schedule.
A resourcing plan would outline the required financial and human resources (at least at a high level). If the budget is not considered, elected officials and the public may be surprised by the cost. As a result, the long-term fiscal sustainability would be questionable, and what is worse, the key action may be delayed or canceled.
The reasoning components are necessary because it creates a clear line of sight between the direction and the work. It helps cascade the goal into actions that are conducive for implementation. Goals may have been set, but if the organization lacks the means to deliver them, this may suggest a need to rethink what the goals are or the organization’s role within the goal area.
- Staff Engagement and Buy-in
If you have read my earlier article, “Strategy Management: Innovation Beyond Planning,” you would know that department staff has a very limited role in strategic planning: they are responsible for implementation and they are the targets of change management, in terms of understanding and supporting the strategy. There are a couple of issues with this approach. First, how can we get the relevant information up there, so that elected officials and senior leaders can be informed about the necessary details down below without having to immerse themselves in the details? There is value in engaging frontline staff and identifying opportunities for them to contribute.
Second, your staff may have already been advocating for many of the “innovations” or “good ideas” identified during the strategic planning process, but they never got any traction because there wasn’t an appetite or senior leadership buy-in. As a result of the strategic planning process, they then had to react to the direction. I am sure they would get the work done, but it is just poor management that there were opportunities to be proactive and to be ahead of the curve that went ignored. It sets a bad tone for culture for people to be innovative and to be accountable. Engaging staff through the scanning process helps surface those opportunities or challenges.
Last but not the least, staff are often worried about performance management because they think it may lead to funding reduction, poor press, political fallout. or the judgement of individual performance, all of which make it difficult for them to do their work properly. Engaging them throughout the process and sharing the reason for change helps them understand the value of the work, and more importantly, helps them use the strategic plan and associated key performance indicators to better tell the story of their work. Why wouldn’t they support the plan when they have a stake in the game?
- Organizational Maturity
To build a sustainable and better community, we need to fight the pandemic, deal with equity, address climate resilience, and many other challenges. We could hire a facilitator and develop a strategy for each of those issues, and then hand it off to staff for implementation, but you may lose opportunities to leverage each strategy as a means to strengthen your organization.
First, if there is an expectation to address those issues on an ongoing basis, then why not create a dedicated position (or team) that is responsible for facilitating the process? It helps get things done, retain corporate knowledge, and gather staff support.
Second, for staff to properly manage the performance of public strategy, there is an ongoing need to learn proper measurement, data collection and verification, and also reporting and evaluation exercises. Their uptake helps provide insight and recommendations both of which are essential for evidence-based decision making to manage the strategy timely.
The world is connected, change is constant, and our community’s expectation is evolving. That’s why I believe developing and maturing organizational competencies through strategy is necessary.
Summary
It may sound quite strange that the development process has to consider the plan implementation so extensively. People may ask if it actually blurs the line as to having elected officials involved too much into the administration and operational issues. The answer is no.
Under strategic planning, the role of elected officials is focusing on representation and policymaking. By representation, they ensure the views of the community are incorporated. By policymaking, they review and approve the work as a way to set the direction for the organization. However, focusing just on those two roles would become challenging and sometimes problematic when it comes to the work of strategy. First, the issue, the associated scope, and the context are often complex and ambiguous. Second, the organization’s role on those issues is often unclear. You cannot just expect elected officials to set a clear direction by listening to the voices of the community.
The initiation step sets an evidence-based foundation to start the conversation and complements the voices of the community. The reasoning components help articulate the direction. Staff engagement creates trust within the organization and strengthens the relationship between elected officials and staff. Last, organizations with growing uptake in performance management are more likely to be able to address or prevent issues and challenges, both of which could not only help elected officials focus on the big picture rather than getting into the nitty gritty of the administration, but also could help them achieve the cause that got them elected in the first place.
So, what’s your plan for the next strategy?
