The Planning Process
For some reasons out of my bureaucratic experience, I always think of it as The Comprehensive Planning Process. An unimportant embellishment, I know.
If there is any one thing you should be famous for, this is it. I don’t care who originally invented it. Like most good things, many people did. All about the same time because they were creating out of the same culture, the same intellectual environment.
THE PLANNING PROCESS
For some reasons out of my bureaucratic experience, I always think of it as The Comprehensive Planning Process. An unimportant embellishment, I know.
If there is any one thing you should be famous for, this is it. I don’t care who originally invented it. Like most good things, many people did. All about the same time because they were creating out of the same culture, the same intellectual environment.
In PPBS which grew out of the Pentagon whiz-kids from California, (Hitch and McKean, et als., wrote it up), the shorthand for it looked like this: OOO [output oriented objectives], SAA [systematic analysis of alternatives], MYP [multi-year plan], MIS [management information system]. The techniques were mostly economic analysis. They sent me to the Harvard “B” school for three weeks to study it.
This isn’t so far from Data Gathering, Goalsetting, Problem Identification, Alternative Solutions/Priority Setting, Implementation, Feedback and Evaluation which you describe in the book
I was familiar with the PPBS ideas and maybe that helped make the process you put forth much more useful to me. I was better prepared to think that way. And your approach to Force-field Analysis was a help, too.
Like a football game. You know the goal you must get to at the other end of the field. You have to know a lot about the obstacles, what to go around, what to go over, etc., as well as a lot about your own resources, to make that touchdown. The electronic/magnetic analogy of a field of force is the best metaphor for the social community in which the planning exists.
In my work, and life, I have found it necessary to add a higher level of concern. I have called it, variously, the Function or Universe within which the planning process acts. PL 89-749 [if I remember correctly] fixed Comprehensive Human Health as the universe Not the same as General Government or my Personal Wellbeing, where a bit more self-definition is required.
My reference platform, my context, for government was always FOPAT, amplified by the approaches mentioned above. That is Function, Objective, Program, Activity, Task. Into those five levels, I was able to fit everything in Dade county government. Reality also intervenes: The function of a police department, for instance, is never completely fulfilled. Goals are never completely attained. It is those functions, those goals, which are as specific as we can get in listing our very human, personal values–our cultural imperatives. They cannot be quantified except in part. They cannot be entirely achieved. If you can accomplish them, they are objectives.
One of the top achievements of the PPBS approach was to insist on naming the effects of a program. The analysis of Cost/Effectiveness was not only the best idea, but it turned out to be fatal to the PPBS effort. The Output, the Effect, of a Marine Platoon is a quantified, real, count of enemy bodies. That is a bit too gritty for a political process that has a motto like In God We Trust. Remember, much of this analysis expertise came out of the Pentagon example.
You recall that before Medicare paid for Kidney Dialysis, a committee had to meet regularly to decide which patients would be served–thus to live a little longer. There were some ingenious administrative contortions on public display to prevent these decisions from entering the political decision process. You must not allow gritty decisions to become footballs in the force-field of their contention. So, PPBS and Effectiveness had to die instead. Rationality has little place in politics. Number is Okay, Abstraction is Okay, Reason is not.
A result of this fact of life was the national shift toward the study of Efficiency. It became the focus of rational analysis back in the 1920’s and again in the 1970’s. Perhaps there is a fifty year pendulum, a natural cycle. Write it down and maybe it’ll surface again in 2020.
I declined the Manager’s offer for me to set up and run the efficiency analysis unit. Everywhere they called it Productivity Analysis. We did too. A wonderful oxymoron is that “Productivity.” It’s actually a continuous cost analysis.
I headed up a Goal Setting project in the Unitarian-Universalist Church of Jacksonville in the early sixties. It was our second step toward instructing an architect in how to design the new facility. We had first done a descriptive, fact finding study of the congregation and it’s resources. So, there again, facts came first in the process. Goals second. We built a wonderful place.
In starting the fact finding process, I remember how you insisted that as we wrote the questionnaires we draw up in full detail, without the numbers, the displays of data we intended to produce. When you revise your “book,” I wish you would add this. I cannot insist too much on the importance of this. If you do not start data collection this way, you will not ever complete it.
Any reasonable person will scoff at that statement. Bully for him. Let him try it and I will laugh–somewhat sadly–because I got trapped in that kind of stupid exercise once. Never again.
The Unitarian-Universalist experience in goal setting is a notable example. It was our custom to think of the church as having five [or maybe it was seven] rather distinct aspects. I do not really remember. Something like: Sunday Morning Worship; Religious Education; Building and Grounds; Minister; Community Impact. The “outputs” of the institution. We had two open meetings on each one. One at a person’s home and one at the church. They were recorded, summarized, written down. All of them. After about three months they were given to the architect.
Again, back in the sixties, with the State Welfare agency, a funds cutback forced us to take stock. I undertook the staff study of the state’s goals. We call them laws. Some were permissive, others were mandatory. I figured out which were which and the board of citizens determined which permissive ones to cut out. An interesting task for a PR man.
I wish someone would celebrate Joe Wholley, senior author of a report on government agency evaluation of their programs, titled “If You Don’t Know Where You Are Going, It Makes No Difference How You Get There.” It tells more about how government works, and doesn’t, than anything else I know.
Your sections on Writing and on Thinking deserve attention. I would not try to tell you anything about them. Everyone else can do that. I know better. Each one, over all, is done better if the product goes to an editor. That is a person or a committee or board. Powerful, arbitrary review makes both sharper.
I was there, in California, when Fran opened her copy of your book and we both took a few minutes to look it over. I was delighted when I got home a week ago (after a month away) and found my copy. It touches the heart of a part of my life that continues highly important to me. Thank you for writing it. See, computers are good for something.
L–h