The consultation went well. Hundreds of survey responses came in, the town halls were full, and the staff session ran over time. Now the planning team has sixty good ideas and room in the plan for maybe five.
That’s the moment strategic planning in the public sector gets hard. In my experience, it goes one of two ways. Either the plan tries to include everything, or leadership quietly picks five priorities and nobody hears why the other fifty-five didn’t make it. Both leave people feeling they weren’t listened to. Gathering input is the easy part. The real work is deciding, and then going back to explain the decision.
What makes strategic planning in the public sector harder?
Public organizations answer to more people than most private companies do. Ministries, municipalities, funders, unions, staff, the public and the communities being served all have a legitimate stake in the plan, and they don’t all want the same things.
I spent most of my career inside that kind of organization, running services across a whole province while reporting to government and working alongside municipalities and unions. What struck me over time was how much complexity builds up. A new requirement arrives and gets bolted onto the old ones. A new reporting line gets added without anything being taken away. Eventually the organization is so layered that planning for it feels impossible.
There are also constraints a private company doesn’t face. A public organization can’t simply stop doing something because it no longer fits the strategy. Some services are required by legislation, others are tied to funding agreements, and priorities can shift with government direction.
Two things follow from all of that. You need input from more places than a private company would, and someone has to be willing to say no.
Decide who decides before you start
Planning breaks down when people are unclear about where decisions get made, so settle that before the first consultation session.
In a board-governed public organization, the board typically approves the strategic plan, often on the CEO’s recommendation. In other settings, that authority may sit with elected officials or senior government leadership. What matters is that everyone understands who makes the final decision. Everyone else is being consulted. That isn’t a lesser role, but it is a different one, and people should know which one they’re in before they give their time. A staff member who thinks they’re voting on the priorities will feel let down when they find out they were being asked for advice.
Being clear about this up front also protects the decision makers. When the hard choices come, nobody can say the process promised them something it didn’t.
How do you engage stakeholders in strategic planning?
Work outward in layers: the board, the leadership team, staff at every level, then the public through surveys, town halls and online engagement.
Each layer sees something the others can’t. The board sees the mandate and the risks. Leadership sees the system as a whole. Frontline staff see where things actually break. The public sees the gaps in the service they receive, which is often the thing the organization is least able to see for itself.
The Spectrum of Public Participation developed by IAP2 is a useful way to be honest about what each group is being offered, across five levels: inform, consult, involve, collaborate and empower. Healthcare Excellence Canada has a good summary for anyone who hasn’t worked with it. Most strategic planning engagement falls somewhere around consult or involve, rather than giving participants direct authority over the final decision. Saying so plainly is part of being clear about who decides.
One thing I’d stress for anyone planning across a large region: a region isn’t one population. Urban centres, rural towns and individual communities can have very different needs and very different ways of being engaged. Sometimes that means separate conversations in separate places, on their terms, so the plan works for each of them and not just for the average.
Listen past the script
I’ve been on the other side of these conversations, as an executive being interviewed by people brought in to help with our plan. More than once, I wondered whether they were listening to my answers or just working through a list of questions.
Good engagement has structure, but it leaves room to step off the script. If someone hesitates before answering, or gives a short answer to a big question, that’s usually the moment to ask one more. Some of the most useful things I’ve heard in planning work came after a pause, not from the prepared questions.
How do you prioritize strategic initiatives when everything matters?
You can’t save the world in one plan. Someone has to choose a small number of priorities and be willing to say “not now” to the rest.
I like organizations to dream a little first. Ask where you’d want to be if things went well, without editing yourself too early. Then test it. Is that dream actually achievable with the money, people and time you have? If it is, what are the steps?
For each idea that comes out of consultation, a few plain questions do most of the sorting:
- Does it address one of our key risks?
- Does it move one of the outcomes we’re trying to achieve?
- Is the impact worth the cost and effort it will take?
- Is this something we’re responsible for delivering?
Those questions tell you whether an idea qualifies. They don’t tell you whether it makes the cut. An idea might address an important risk or move an outcome forward and still not belong in this plan, because it has to compete with other priorities for the same limited money, people and time. That’s where the difficult decisions happen, and where someone has to be willing to make them.
Some ideas will be good ideas at the wrong time. That’s where “not now” matters. Keep a short list of them and bring it back at the annual refresh, so a deferred idea doesn’t become a forgotten one.
Close the loop: explain what made the plan and what didn’t
Before the plan goes for approval, go back to the people you consulted and show them what you heard, what you decided and why some things were left out.
I call this validating the plan, and it’s the step I see skipped most often. It isn’t another vote on the priorities. It’s a chance to check that you’ve understood the input correctly, explain the trade-offs, and catch anything important you missed before the plan is approved. It can make a real difference to whether people understand and accept the plan.
A validation summary doesn’t need to be long. It has three parts:
What we heard. The main themes from every group you engaged, in plain language, including the ones leadership found uncomfortable. If people can’t recognize their own input here, nothing that follows will land.
What we’ve included. The priorities that made it into the plan, and which themes each one responds to. This is where staff and the public should be able to find their own concerns reflected.
What we haven’t included, and why. The ideas that didn’t make it, with an honest reason for each: too costly for now, outside the mandate, lower impact than what was chosen, or deferred to the next refresh.
That third part is the one most organizations leave out, and it’s the one that matters most. People can accept a difficult decision when they understand it. When they discover the cuts after the plan is published, they tend to conclude that the consultation was for show, and by then it’s too late to change that impression.
Write all of it in language the people you consulted actually use. A plan written for this many audiences has to be simple enough for all of them, and the validation summary is the first test of whether it is.
In an organization I worked with in New Zealand, the youth cadets helped shape the values using simple phrases like “do the right thing” and “we are straight up.” That language resonated with people at every level because they could see what it meant in their everyday work. It stuck because it sounded like the people who belonged to the organization, rather than a collection of corporate buzzwords.
Choosing is the hard part
In the public sector, hearing from everyone is the expected part of strategic planning, and most organizations do it reasonably well. What separates a plan that sticks from one that doesn’t is what happens next: someone with the authority to decide makes real choices, and then goes back to explain them to the people who gave their time.
If you’re partway through a planning process now, try writing the “what we haven’t included, and why” page before the plan goes for final approval. If it’s hard to write, that’s useful information. It usually means the choices haven’t really been made yet.
Once the plan is approved, the work shifts to keeping it in use. I’ve written about that in why strategic plans fail after the board signs off. If you’re starting a plan and want help with the engagement or the decisions, you can read more about WMC’s strategy development and implementation work.
