Mindful of the future: Strategic planning ideology and the culture of nonprofit management

Human Organization, Fall 1999 by Mulhare, Eileen M

Two authoritative concepts form the ideological foundations of SP. "Planning" consists of formal, systematic, integrated methods of organizational decision making, aimed at ensuring that the organization achieves its goals (Hayden 1986:xvi-xvii, 312-313). "Strategy" is a cohesive pattern of actions that help "marshal and allocate an organization's resources into a unique and viable posture based on its relative internal competencies and shortcomings, anticipated changes in the environment, and contingent moves by intelligent opponents" (Quinn 1996:3, original italics removed). Not all strategies are the product of planning, and not all planning seeks to produce strategies (Mintzberg 1987).

SP values entrepreneurial leadership as a source of creativity and also values participatory democracy, or at least staff input, as a basis for achieving consensus (Grace 1996: 5-6). But SP also acknowledges the difficulty in striking a balance between the two. The balance is accomplished by establishing an organizational decision-making process that is transparent and systematic (Hayden 1986:12-13, 329). SP specialists have developed a variety of logical frameworks for guiding this process (De Kare-Silver 1997:37-57; Gilbert et al. 1988). Among the other values SP endorses are foresight, rationalism, quantification, and individual deference to the group. The interests of the organization necessarily take precedence over the interests of its constituent parts, since the ultimate purpose of SP is to advance the well-being of the organization as a whole (Hayden 1986:312; Steiner 1979:4-5).

Since the 1970s, Mintzberg (1973), Quinn (1980), and others have used case-study evidence to challenge the validity of SP's basic tenets. In brief, their argument is as follows. SP does not necessarily produce wiser decisions than the informal, incremental, piecemeal processes it is meant to supplant. Organizations develop successful strategies primarily through managerial intuition, happenstance, and experiential learning. Deliberately planned strategies are mostly ineffectual and even counterproductive. SP tends to inhibit creativity and adaptability and reinforce the status quo (see Mintzberg 1994). SP proponents dispute some of the evidence, yet they acknowledge that an organization using SP may have to wait years before any tangible benefits materialize (Bryson 1995:7).

Origins of the SP Movement

SP arose in the 1960s as an outgrowth of the long-range planning movement, also known as the programmed-management or management-systems movement. Pioneer theorists include Peter Drucker (1959) and Igor Ansoff (1965), Marvin Bower (1966) of McKinsey and Company, Bruce Henderson (1979) of the Boston Consulting Group, and Michael Porter (1980). The first SP users were large-scale manufacturing firms, such as General Electric, who sought new forms of cost-benefit analysis to improve their return on investment. Early SP techniques relied heavily on mainframe computers and various sorts of visual aids-grids, charts, and matrices-to reduce vast amounts of quantitative data into a small set of decision-making alternatives (Gilbert et al. 1988:59-65). Only organizations with the resources to hire full-time planning experts or policy analysts could afford to adopt SP. From the 1960s to the early 1980s the use of SP spread from major corporations to the military and specialists in international affairs, but not much further (Bryson 1995:5).