Strategic Planning vs. Strategic Doing in Economic Development

<p>Jonathan Morgan is a School of Government faculty member.</p> <p>Communities and regions increasingly use strategic planning to chart their course for economic development.  Strategic planning is a process that involves assessing a community’s assets and opportunities and building consensus around a set of concrete goals and strategies for achieving desired outcomes.  Although strategic planning is widely used in economic development, it is not always used effectively.  The process often loses steam once the strategic plan document is completed, and the strategic plan itself often fails to produce tangible results.  A community hires a consultant to facilitate the process, spends considerable time and resources convening stakeholder meetings, conducting analysis, and preparing a final planning document, only to see nothing really get done.  The strategic plan document ends up on a shelf collecting dust.  So, where does the process of strategic planning for economic development tend to get bogged down and why?</p> <p>Many efforts at strategic planning break down at the stage of implementation because of poorly conceived goals, lack of commitment from key individuals and organizations, and the loss of momentum that can occur when too much time passes with no visible outcomes.  Indeed, the longer-term perspective that traditional strategic planning takes can cause substantial actions to be put off too far into the future. One criticism of traditional strategic planning (which originated within the context of military planning) is that it is too rigid and hierarchical to enable communities to adapt to a rapidly changing global economy.  From this perspective, conditions “on the ground” in economic [...]</p>