The Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning

Organizations have to engage in the process of planning in order to coordinate their activities to ensure integration of all processes and procedures.

Strategy formation should be a controlled, conscious process of thought.

Strategies should be unique: the best ones result from the process of creative design.

The issue is not simply whether management is committed to planning. It is also whether planning is committed to management; whether commitment to planning engenders commitment to strategy making, to the strategies that result from that process, and ultimately to the taking of effective actions by the organization; whether the very nature of planning actually fosters managerial commitment to itself.

When planners own the process, taking charge of the integration of the different subunit plans, in effect they remove control over strategy from the very people who are supposed to think it through. That undermines commitment to the strategy making process as well as to its resulting strategies.

Accepting that plans themselves are necessary to function in free society does not lead to the conclusion that the process of planning is itself fundamentally democratic.

When plans are clearly articulated, they tend to breed resistance to change. Plans are meant for coordination and the more tightly coordinated the plan is, the less flexible it must be.

Planning is obsessed with control—of decisions and strategies, of the present and the future, of thoughts and actions, of workers and managers, of markets and customers.

Planners may see their procedures as merely bringing order and rationality—in effect, coordination—to decision making, but they fail to see that coordination is control.

The conditions surrounding the strategy making process may be dynamic, but a general assumption behind much of the planning literature is that the process itself is not: it is an unhurried process that unfolds on a predetermined schedule, with carefully considered formulation followed by tightly controlled implementation.

The process of strategy making must always be dynamic, precisely because it is about change and one can never know when and how environments will change.

To achieve successful strategic planning, then the scenarios must be formally factored into the organization’s plans. To turn a set of scenarios into a deterministic plan would not make sense, unless there is overwhelming confidence in one of them.

No amount of elaboration will ever enable formal procedures to forecast discontinuities, to inform managers who are detached from their operations, to create novel strategies. Ultimately, the term “strategic planning” has proven to be an oxymoron.