FIFTH EDITION
“Leading and managing public-serving organizations in complex environments is a distinct form of professional practice, and strategic planning is one of its key aspects. Bryson has thought through this issue from every angle, so the fortunate reader of the latest edition of this landmark book can readily deliberate about how best to apply their own intelligence to leading and managing public service organizations in the here and now, wherever and whenever that may be.”
Michael Barzelay
Professor
London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE)
“Nobody captures the processes, insights, and strategies for strategic management like John Bryson does. He has produced another tour de force with the fifth edition of Strategic Planning for Public and Nonprofit Organizations.”
Frances S. Berry
Reubin O'D. Askew Eminent Scholar and Frank Sherwood Professor of Public Administration
Askew School of Public Administration and Policy Florida State University
“The new fifth edition gives us a new best-book-in-the-world on strategic planning for public and nonprofit organizations. Bryson does a masterful job of integrating intellectual insight and practical knowledge, showing conclusively that good theory can be very practical.”
Barry Bozeman
Arizona Centennial Professor of Science and Technology Policy and Public Management
Director of the Center for Organization Research and Design
Arizona State University
“Public and nonprofit leaders are facing significant and unprecedented challenges today. Navigating these challenges and creating innovation in a complex world without a roadmap and guideposts is impossible. Once again John Bryson, in his latest edition of Strategic Planning for Public and Nonprofit Organizations, provides a clear framework for creating sustainable change in a complex world. This book is a must-read for leaders and managers to effectively create strategies for transformative change.”
Gary Cunningham
President and CEO of the Metropolitan Economic Development Association
Minneapolis, MN
“In a time of great uncertainty for public organizations, strategic management is a must to survive. Bryson's new book shows the way forward and how to manage it. A must-read for practitioners and students alike, which treats the whole strategic planning and management process and activities in depth.”
Erik Hans Klijn
Professor
Department of Public Administration and Sociology
Erasmus University
Rotterdam, The Netherlands
President
International Research Society for Public Management
“There has never been more pressure on public and nonprofit leaders to demonstrate their value to the world. Strategic planning is a key means to do so, but too often it becomes a make-work exercise in practice. To avoid that trap, read this book. John Bryson is the undisputed master of how to make strategic planning work in the public and nonprofit sectors, and this book is the bible on the topic.”
Donald Moynihan
Professor and Director
La Follette School of Public Affairs
University of Wisconsin–Madison
“Anyone working in complex systems and facing dynamic change should grab this book to help you think, prepare, and act. For the novice, it provides an invaluable foundation for approaching strategy development and execution. For the experienced leader, this resource offers fresh tools and insights on applications that can energize your efforts within and across organizations.”
Laurie Ohmann
Senior Vice President of Client Services & Community Partnerships
Catholic Charities of St. Paul and Minneapolis, MN
“John Bryson's Strategic Planning for Public and Nonprofit Organizations is THE book I always recommend to practitioners and academics alike. There is no better book on planning on the market today.”
Rosemary O'Leary
Edwin O. Stene Distinguished Professor
Director, School of Public Affairs
University of Kansas
President
Public Management Research Association
“Bryson's work has benefited innumerable practitioners and students in the US and well beyond it. Now this fifth edition even further ties together strategic planning with strategic thinking, acting, and learning. The book thus completes an impressive intellectual trajectory across the field of the strategic management of public services organizations.”
Edoardo Ongaro
Professor of Public Management
The Open University
United Kingdom
President
European Group for Public Administration (EGPA)
“John Bryson is the doyen of strategic planning for public services. This fifth edition of his book is essential and required reading for all students and practitioners.”
Stephen Osborne
Chair of International Public Management
University of Edinburgh
Editor
Public Management Review
“This new edition is a great resource for practitioners, scholars, and students learning the art and science of strategic planning as a basis for strategic management. It operationalizes practical guidance, showing how strategic thinking, acting, learning, and deliberation have to be designed and integrated into the strategic planning process.”
David M. Van Slyke
Dean and Louis A. Bantle Chair in Business and Government Policy
The Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs
Syracuse University
“The new edition of this most authoritative book on public and nonprofit strategic management responds effectively to the changing environment of our time, incorporating more content on governance, collaboration, deliberation, sustainability, and public value creation. Beautifully written, theoretically sound, and practically useful, it is a must-read for scholars, practitioners, and students who want to keep abreast of the field.”
Kaifeng Yang
Professor
Reubin O'D. Askew School of Public Administration and Policy
Florida State University
Dean and Professor, School of Public Administration and Policy
Renmin University of China
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Copyright © 2018 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved.
Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey
Published simultaneously in Canada
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Bryson, John M. (John Moore), 1947- author.
Title: Strategic planning for public and nonprofit organizations: a guide to strengthening and sustaining organizational achievement / John M. Bryson.
Description: Fifth edition. | Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2017. | Series: Bryson on strategic planning | Revised edition of the author's Strategic planning for public and nonprofit organizations, c2001. | Includes bibliographical references and index. |
Identifiers: LCCN 2017040594 (print) | LCCN 2017040996 (ebook) | ISBN 9781119071792 (pdf) | ISBN 9781119071617 (epub) | ISBN 9781119071600 (hardback)
Subjects: LCSH: Strategic planning. | Nonprofit organizations—Management. |
Public administration. | BISAC: BUSINESS & ECONOMICS / Nonprofit Organizations & Charities.
Classification: LCC HD30.28 (ebook) | LCC HD30.28 .B79 2017 (print) | DDC 658.4/012—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017040594
Cover Design: Wiley
Cover Image: © Ivanastar/Getty Images
This book is dedicated to all of my students over the past 40-plus years, all the organizations with whom I have been privileged to work, and the people who have been kind enough to read and comment on this book in its several editions. I owe you all a deep debt of gratitude—not least for all that I have learned from you.
This book addresses a number of important questions facing the leaders and managers of public and nonprofit organizations as they cope with the challenges that confront their organizations, now and in the years ahead. How should they respond to the increasingly uncertain and interconnected environments in which their organizations operate? How should they respond to dwindling or unpredictable resources; new public expectations or formal mandates; demographic changes; technology changes; deregulation or reregulation; upheavals in international, national, state, and local economies and polities; and new roles for public, nonprofit, and business organizations, including calls for them to collaborate more often? What should their organizations' missions be? How can they create greater and more enduring public value? How can they formulate desirable strategies and implement them effectively? These are the questions this book addresses.
Strategic Planning for Public and Nonprofit Organizations is based on two premises. The first is that leaders and managers of public and nonprofit organizations must be effective strategists if their organizations are to fulfill their missions, meet their mandates, satisfy their constituents, and create public value. These leaders and managers need to exercise as much discretion as possible in the areas under their control. They need to develop effective strategies to cope with changed and changing circumstances, and they need to develop a coherent and defensible basis for their decisions. They also need to build the capacity—the resilience—of their organizations to respond to significant challenges in the future.
The second premise is that leaders and managers are most likely to discern the way forward via a reasonably disciplined process of deliberation with others when the situations faced require more than technical fixes. To succeed, deliberative processes also need institutional and organizational processes and structures in place to support them. The deliberative tradition, however, nowhere implies that there is “one best answer” to major challenges, only that there is the possibility of gaining understanding, finding common ground, and making wise choices via the deliberative process.
Strategic planning at its best makes extensive use of analysis and synthesis in deliberative settings to help leaders and managers successfully address the major challenges that their organization (or other entity) faces. This book begins by defining strategic planning as a deliberative, disciplined approach to producing fundamental decisions and actions that shape and guide what an organization (or other entity) is, what it does, and why it does it. Strategic planning has an important role to play as part—but only a part—of complex social problem solving. Specifically, it can be helpful for:
As experience with this kind of deliberative approach has grown, a substantial and expanding inventory of knowledge, guidance, procedures, tools, and techniques has also developed to assist leaders and managers. Strategic planning of this kind has become a standard part of management thinking and practice in the business world. Strategic planning has also become the standard practice of large numbers of public and nonprofit organizations. Of course, strategic planning isn't always called for, doesn't always work, or can work quite badly. This book is intended to help practitioners make suitable, wise, and effective use of strategic planning.
The first four editions of this book played an important role in promoting the use of strategic planning by public and nonprofit organizations. The practice of strategic planning has progressed substantially, and new areas of concern have emerged. Although this fifth edition covers many of the same topics as the first four editions, it also focuses on additional areas requiring special attention. All of the chapters and references have been updated, and new cases have been added. In addition, new material has been added on:
The fourth edition's resource on developing a livelihood scheme, which links competencies and distinctive competencies directly to organizational aspirations, has been dropped to save space. The resource basically repeated what is in Bryson, Ackermann, and Eden (2007). In addition, the resource on how to use strategy mapping has been dropped because that information is now in a new workbook called Visual Strategy (Bryson, Ackermann, & Eden, 2014).
The fifth edition reflects a continuing major trend in the field by explicitly blending strategic planning with leadership and ongoing management. People realize that the former is no substitute for the latter. People also realize that strategic thinking, acting, and learning must go together for strategic planning to serve its function as a deliberative process focused on identifying and addressing important organizational issues. Of course, these points were all emphasized in the previous editions, but they are emphasized even more in the fifth edition. The book is therefore as much about strategic management—and indeed strategic governance—as it is about strategic planning. I have kept the original title, however, because of the recognition and following that the first four editions have achieved worldwide.
The new edition also reflects another continuing trend in the field by highlighting the importance of inclusion, analysis and synthesis, and speed as means to increasing organizational and community effectiveness (Bryson, 2003). The idea is to get more people of various kinds and skills involved, increase the sophistication and quality of analysis and synthesis used to inform action, and do it all more quickly than in the past. Doing any two of the three is not so hard, but doing all three together is very hard. One of the challenges the book presents, but does not really solve, is how to be inclusive, analytic, synthetic, and quick all at once. Figuring out how to address this effectively is one of the continuing tasks for the field.
In short, this edition places a renewed emphasis on the fact that strategic planning is not the same as strategic thinking, acting, learning, or deliberation. What matters most is strategic thinking, acting, and learning in a deliberative context. Strategic planning is useful only if it improves strategic thought, action, and learning; it is not a substitute for them. Strategic planning also does not produce deliberation unless it is designed into the process. The reader should keep clearly in mind that the formation, or realization, of strategies in practice has a variety of sources (the vision of new leaders, intuition, group learning, innovation, what already works, chance), and strategic planning is only one of them. Wise strategic thought, action, and learning takes all of them into account. As Mintzberg (1994, p. 367) famously noted, “Strategy formation cannot be helped by people blind to the richness of its reality.”
Specifically, this book:
This book is written for two main groups. The first consists of elected and appointed policymakers, managers, and planners in governments, public agencies, and nonprofit organizations who are responsible for and who want to learn more about strategic planning and management. The book will help them understand what those are and how to make use of them in their own organizations and, to a lesser extent, their communities. Thus, the book speaks to city council members, mayors, city managers, administrators, and planners; sheriffs, police chiefs, fire chiefs, and their staffs; school board members, administrators, and staff; county commissioners, administrators, and planners; governors, state cabinet secretaries, administrators, and planners; legislators; chief executive officers, chief administrative officers, chief financial officers, and chief information officers; executive directors, deputy directors, and unit directors; presidents and vice presidents; elected and appointed officials of governments and public agencies; and boards of directors of nonprofit organizations.
The second major audience consists of academics and students of strategic planning and management. For-credit and professional development courses on strategic planning and management are now typically offered in schools of public affairs, public administration, planning, and public policy. This book offers participants in these courses a useful blend of theory and practice.
Others who will find the book interesting are businesspeople and citizens interested in increasing their understanding of how to improve the effectiveness and value creation of governments, public agencies, and nonprofit organizations. To a lesser extent, the book is also intended to help these individuals understand and improve their communities.
Part One introduces the reader to the dynamics of strategic planning. Chapter 1 introduces the concept of strategic planning and why such planning is important for governments, public agencies, nonprofit organizations, and communities. Attention is focused on strategic planning for: (1) public agencies, departments, or major organizational divisions; (2) general purpose governments; (3) nonprofit organizations; (4) a function, such as transportation, health care, or education that bridges organizational and governmental boundaries; (5) interorganizational networks and collaborations; and (6) entire communities, urban or metropolitan areas, regions, or states seen as economic, social, and political entities.
Benefits of strategic planning are emphasized as are the conditions under which strategic planning should not be undertaken. In this chapter, I also argue that the practice of public and nonprofit strategic planning will become further institutionalized and improved over time. The reason is that—at its best—strategic planning can accommodate substantive rationality; technical and administrative feasibility; legal, ethical, and moral justifiability; and—of crucial importance—political acceptability.
Finally, readers will be introduced to three organizations whose most recent experiences with strategic planning will be used throughout the book to illustrate key points. The first is the City of Minneapolis, which has been making use of strategic planning for many years and keeps developing its performance management system. The second is a nonprofit organization, the Metropolitan Economic Development Association (MEDA), which is headquartered in Minneapolis. MEDA has been in the business of helping minority entrepreneurs and minority-owned businesses for more than 45 years and has an excellent track record of success. The third is the International Organization of Supreme Audit Institutions (INTOSAI), a nonprofit organization in association with the United Nations that brings together the peak audit organizations of 194 governments internationally. The U.S. Government Accountability Office is the U.S. representative.
In Chapter 2, I present my preferred approach to strategic planning and management, which I call the Strategy Change Cycle. This approach has been used effectively by thousands of governments, public agencies, and nonprofit organizations in the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, and Australia, and indeed on every continent—except perhaps Antarctica! Since Peking University Press published a Chinese-language version of the book, use of the approach is also on the rise in China. Chapters 3 through 10, which make up Part Two, describe in detail how to apply the approach.
Chapter 3 covers the initial agreement, or readiness assessment and “plan for planning,” phase of the strategic planning process. Chapter 4 focuses on identification of mandates and the clarification of mission and values. Chapter 5 addresses the assessment of an organization's external and internal environments. Chapter 6 discusses strategic issues—what they are, how they can be identified, and how to critique them. Chapter 7 is devoted to the development of effective strategies and plans, along with their review and adoption. Chapter 8 covers the development of the organization's vision of success—that is, what the organization should look like as it fulfills its mission and achieves its full potential. Chapter 9 attends to development of an effective implementation process. Chapter 10 covers reassessment of strategies and the strategic planning process as a prelude to a new round of strategic planning. Chapters 3 through 7 thus emphasize the planning aspect of the Strategy Change Cycle, and Chapters 8 through 10 highlight the management aspects. Jointly, the eight chapters together encompass the strategic management process.
Part Three includes two chapters designed to help leaders know what they will need to do to get started with strategic planning and to make it work. Chapter 11 covers the many leadership roles and responsibilities necessary for the exercise of effective strategic leadership for public and nonprofit organizations. These roles include sponsoring, championing, and facilitating a reasonably deliberative process in such a way that an organization's situation is clearly understood, wise decisions are made and implemented, residual conflicts are handled well, and the organization is prepared for the next round of strategy change. Chapter 12 assesses the strategic planning experiences of the three organizations used as examples throughout the text. This chapter also provides guidance on how to begin strategic planning.
Two resource sections are included at the end of the text. Resource A presents an array of stakeholder identification and analysis methods designed to help organize participation, create strategic ideas worth implementing, organize a coalition of support in favor of the ideas, and protect the ideas during implementation. Resource B presents information on how Internet-based tools and social media may be used to support a strategy change cycle.
Strategic Planning for Public and Nonprofit Organizations will provide most of the guidance leaders, managers, and planners need to engage in a deliberative strategic planning and management process aimed at making their organizations (and communities) more effective and responsive to their environments. This book presents a simple yet effective strategic planning and management process designed specifically for public and nonprofit organizations, detailed advice on how to apply the process, and examples of its application. The entire exposition is grounded in the relevant research and literature, so readers will know where the process fits in with prior research and practice and can gain added insight on how to apply the process.
Three workbooks can help practitioners work through both the conception and nuts and bolts of the strategic planning and management process. The first is coauthored with Farnum Alston, a highly skilled and experienced consultant, called Creating and Implementing Your Strategic Plan, Third Edition (2011). This workbook is designed primarily to help those who are relatively new to strategic planning—along with those who are old hands—to guide themselves through the Strategy Change Cycle. The workbook, however, is clearly not a substitute for the book. Effective strategic planning is an art that involves thoughtful tailoring to specific contexts. Strategic Planning for Public and Nonprofit Organizations provides considerable guidance on how to think about the tailoring process, including many process guidelines, caveats, and case examples. Thus, the book should be read first before the workbook is used and should be consulted on a regular basis throughout the course of a Strategy Change Cycle.
The second workbook is designed to provide more detailed attention to the implementation and management of strategies. For this workbook, called Implementing and Sustaining Your Strategic Plan (2011), I teamed with longtime consultant, colleague, and friend, Sharon Anderson, as well as Farnum Alston. Again, the book should be read before the workbook is used.
The third workbook, Visual Strategy: Strategy Mapping for Public and Nonprofit Organizations (2014), shows how to make use of visual strategy mapping, an extremely powerful technique for helping individuals and groups figure out what they think they should be doing, how, and why. Visual strategy maps are causal maps that show what leads to (or causes) what. When done, maps indicate how missions are fulfilled via goal achievement and how goals are reached through carefully thought-through strategy and action. The book is coauthored with long-time friends and collaborators Fran Ackermann and Colin Eden.
Minneapolis, Minnesota
John M. Bryson
July 2017
Space limitations prevent me from thanking again by name all those dozens of people who contributed to the previous four editions of this book. They should all know that I remain deeply grateful to them. Without their insights, thoughtfulness, advice, and other forms of help, neither those editions nor this one would have been written. I carry their wisdom with me every day. I must also express deep gratitude to the many readers who gave me valuable feedback on the previous editions of this book.
There is space, however, for me to thank at least some of the people who contributed their insights, advice, and support to the fifth edition. Deep thanks and appreciation must go to Colin Eden at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, Scotland, and Fran Ackermann at Curtin University in Perth, Australia, who have been valued colleagues and coauthors in the field of public and nonprofit strategic management for over 30 years. Both are coauthors of Visual Strategy, a new companion workbook that shows how to do strategy mapping, an important strategic planning technique.
I would also like to offer special thanks to Michael Barzelay at the London School of Economics and Political Science, who has helped me gain a far richer understanding of what I was up to and how best to do it than I ever would have achieved otherwise. And I would like to offer special thanks to Michael Quinn Patton, a path-breaking evaluation theorist and practitioner who helped me see the connections between strategic planning and developmental evaluation. The result was a new approach to strategy formulation introduced in this book called principles-focused strategizing.
A number of practitioners also provided immense help. I am reminded of the old adage: A practitioner is a theorist who pays a price for being wrong. These thoughtful, public-spirited, good-hearted friends and colleagues have shared with me their hard-won insights and have provided invaluable knowledge and encouragement necessary to produce the fifth edition. Their number includes Farnum Alston, my coauthor on Creating Your Strategic Plan, Third Edition, a companion workbook focused primarily on developing a strategic plan, and of Implementing and Sustaining Your Strategic Plan, a second companion workbook focused on plan implementation. Another outstanding practitioner who has been an immense source of wisdom and insight is Sharon Roe Anderson, my coauthor (along with Farnum) on Implementing and Sustaining Your Strategic Plan. Peter Fleck and Mallory Mitchell helped coauthor Resource B, for which I am grateful.
All who finish reading this book will know how grateful I am to several other practitioners who were involved in the main strategic planning cases featured in this book. At the City of Minneapolis, these include Jay Stroebel (currently city manager of Brooklyn Park, Minnesota), Cassidy Gardenier, Kim Keller, Anna Koelsch, Andrea Larson, and Jeff Schneider. At the Metropolitan Economic Development Association in Minneapolis, special thanks go to President and CEO Gary Cunningham, Joanna Ramirez Barrett, Andrew O'Leary, Michelle Tran Maryns, Ashley Michels, and Kelley Reierson. And at the U.S. Government Accountability Office, I deeply appreciate the help of the staff who were the champions of the strategic planning process undertaken by the International Organization of Supreme Audit Institutions (INTOSAI).
At the Humphrey School, I would like to offer special thanks to the former dean Eric Schwartz and our current dean Laura Bloomberg for their support in a host of ways. And, of course, I would like to thank all of my faculty and staff colleagues in the Public and Nonprofit Leadership Center. In addition, I want to acknowledge the contributions of my research assistants Jeff Ochs, Kassira Absar, Mallory Mitchell, and Danbi Seo.
I also owe my gratitude to my former students who helped develop some of the information used in the three case illustrations throughout the book. The following students produced invaluable team papers on the strategic management efforts of the City of Minneapolis: (1) Brad Christ, Lindsay Bergh, Megan Evans, and Milo Weil (Christ et al., 2009); (2) Chelsea Arbury, Laura Durden, Liz Harens, and Noah Wiedenfeld (Arbury et al., 2014); (3) Kaela Dickens, Daniel D'Haem, Darin Newman, and Jocelyn Rousey (Dickens et al., 2015); and Margie Andreason, Ashleigh Norris, Suzanne Oh, Patrick Roisen, Alan Roy, Mark Skogen, Scott Vargo, and Susan Wooten (Andreason et al., 2016).
Student team papers that were very helpful for understanding the efforts of the Metropolitan Economic Development Association case were written by: (1) Andrew Ostlund, Carolyn Dienhart, Sanjay Jain, and Yue Zhang (Ostlund et al., 2014); (2) Akua Asare, Serge Michel, Andrew Uhler, and Noah Wiedenfeld (Asare et al., 2014); and (3) Anand Agrawal, John Chisholm, Dani Gorman, Suzanne Lantto (Agrawal et al., 2015).
Finally, Peter Huff, Christina Field, Faris Kassim, and Kelly Parpovic produced a team paper that helped clarify and analyze the strategic planning efforts of INTOSAI. Peter Huff (2017) followed up on the team's work and produced the final document that was submitted to INTOSAI and was the major source of written information on which the book draws.
Some ideas in Chapters 1 and 2 appeared first in Bryson and Einsweiler (1987); Bryson and Roering (1987); and in a book coedited with Bob Einsweiler (1988). Parts of Chapter 7 appeared in Bryson (1988). Parts of Chapter 4 and Resource A appeared in Bryson (2004). Earlier versions of some material in Chapters 9, 10, and 11 appeared in Bryson and Crosby (1992) and Crosby and Bryson (2005). Some material on public values and creating public value appeared first in Bryson, Crosby, and Bloomberg (2014, 2015a and 2015b).
Finally, I must thank my spouse, Barbara Crosby, herself a skilled academic, and our two wonderful children, Jessica and John (“Kee”), for their love, support, understanding, intelligence, and good humor. Barbara is my best friend, closest adviser, and the person who more than any other has helped me understand and appreciate what love could be. She has also taught me a great deal about leadership and strategic planning. Jessica and Kee are terrific, and I love them deeply. I am also delighted to have our grandson, Benjamin, who more than anyone helps put this work in perspective. My hope is that this book will help make the world a better place for our children and grandchildren—and everyone's children. If it does, I will be very thankful.
J. M. B.