Q2. Why are strategic plans often less impactful than hoped?

In practice, strategic plans by government agencies and jurisdictions often end up on the shelf as expensive paperweights. One reason is that, too often, they’re developed by a narrow group—usually a strategic planning team working with leadership. Those plans don't achieve broader buy-in from staff and other stakeholders, nor do they reflect the input of staff with implementation expertise.

A second, less obvious reason that strategic plans often fall flat is the theory underlying them: that if we pick the right set of goals, strategies and initiatives and then implement them well, we will achieve the results we want. It’s a prescriptive approach that assumes we have all the answers, including knowledge about the complex causal relationships involved.

The reality, of course, is that we are often guessing about what affects what. That’s not because of a lack of expertise or competence, but rather because the work that government does is complicated. From fighting poverty to addressing the opioid crisis to tackling climate change, if the answers were easy we’d have solved these challenges already. A similar point was made 30 years ago by Bob Behn, now at the Harvard Kennedy School, in his seminal article, “Management by Groping Along.” Public managers, Behn noted, “need to have a clear sense of mission for their agency. But they will never know precisely how to realize these purposes.” Rather than aiming to create the perfect plan, Behn argued, public managers “must experiment with various initiatives, trying to determine what works and what does not.”

Q3. Strategy and evidence: A missing link

Behn's emphasis on experimentation and determining what works overlaps strongly with the evidence-based policy movement. Yet strategic planning and evidence efforts rarely intersect. Experts on these topics generally sit in separate offices within agencies and view their work as largely unrelated. Not surprisingly, three decades after Behn’s article, most agencies and jurisdictions are still trying to create the perfect strategic plan rather than aiming to get better at learning what works.

Q4. A next generation approach to strategic planning

A new approach to strategic planning -- one that builds solidly on the traditional version but adds some new elements -- would integrate evidence-based decision-making practices into strategic planning. The focus would be on strengthening an organizational culture of learning and continuous improvement. The goal should be a culture that builds evidence about what’s working and what’s not, and then uses that evidence, with built-in feedback loops, to refine initiatives and strategies over time. To do that, organizations would need to:

1. 1. Clearly define what success looks like for each goal, using qualitative or quantitative measures—or both if possible. If you want to build a culture of continuous improvement, you need to be clear about what kind of improvement you’re aiming for.
   2. Create learning agendas for each main goal or strategy. Learning agendas identify key research and operational questions that need to be answered in order to improve results. A question could be about which version of a program works best, or it could be about whether a program or policy works as well for rural as for urban areas. Learning agendas help focus evidence efforts—including program evaluation, data analytics and rapid experimentation—on priority questions.
   3. Develop clear logic models for each initiative. Logic models tie inputs and activities to outputs and outcomes. They don’t need to be complicated. The goal is to clarify assumptions about what affects what and to specify the expected results. They’re useful for implementation planning as well as to inform how results will be evaluated.
   4. Implement evaluation strategies for each initiative, formalizing the feedback loop. Without this step, it is difficult to credibly know whether those initiatives are working as intended or how they can be improved over time. Evaluation strategies do not need to be overly complicated or expensive, but they need to produce credible information about what works.
   5. Establish a process of regular evidence reviews, providing leadership with an opportunity to access evaluation results and act on that information. That includes refining initiatives and strategies over time and, with robust evidence, making investment and divestment decisions.