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If we reflect on the guidance that was given to Turkish civil servants and public managers on how to do strategic planning, we can notice all the things that were stressed, given a lot of attention and different from what we expected. And these can be used to make inferences about the pragmatic theory being employed by the writers of the guidance. There are quite a few that can be suggested, with many of them being focused on making strategic plans more successful.

First, there is guidance to be accurate in the formulation of mission, vision and goals. This accuracy is recommended in the interests of a successful strate-gic plan. Presumably, more accurate formulation of mission, vision and goals is important because the intentions are more correctly understood when strategies are designed and strategic implementation is managed. If there is inaccurate for-mulation, there will be disappointment later because of poor choice of strategies and poor targeting of efforts at managing their implementation.

Second, civil servants and public managers are guided to begin strategic plan-ning with a situational analysis (legal analysis, stakeholder analysis, SWOT analy-sis) prior to the formulation of mission, vision and goals. This was surprising. It was justified on the basis that it would encourage realism in the strategic plan-ning process, which would no doubt lead to easier implementation and more successful strategic plans.

A third implicit theory might be inferred from the fact that the guidance went into a lot of detail on costing and resource planning, and clearly was stressing the need for this to be given a lot of attention. Guidance was given on how goals, objectives, timing and strategies would need to be reviewed if the costs of the strategic plan exceeded the total of the estimated resources available. This might also be seen as a concern for realism, but financial realism in this case.

Fourth, it was advised that the involvement of representatives of the intended beneficiaries in the strategic plan would help produce a better understanding of what they wanted. We can presume that this would help with the formulation of an accurate statement of the mission, vision and goals.

Fifth, while the line of reasoning is not completely clear, there seemed to be an implicit theory that the strategic planning process would encourage a stronger perception among employees of an overarching institutional identity, and that this would in turn lead to services being delivered that were in keeping with the institutional identity. It is possible that it was thought that the strategic planning process would educate employees and that they would internalize the mission, vision and goals, which would support the implementation of the strategic plan.

Sixth, the early and repeated concern to build participative methods into the strategic planning process was justified as important because it would build own-ership of the strategic plan, which in turn would mean better implementation of the strategic plan.

Seventh, it was recommended that in selecting members of the strategic plan-ning team this was done in such a way that the main units of the organization, the administrative levels and all the specialities were represented. It is possible that this focus on its representative quality was important in terms of all interests being represented when decisions were being made. Perhaps this was meant to enable the team to negotiate decisions to suit the plurality of interests within the organization. This would mean, in turn, that some consent to the strategic plan would be based on this negotiation within the team and thus would facilitate implementation of the strategic plan.

Finally, and the eighth of the suggested implicit theories, the guidance docu-ment stressed the importance of accurate and complete data as the basis of mon-itoring and evaluation of the strategic plan, with these processes being important for organizational learning and for accountability.

If the inferences about the implicit theory of the guidance that have been drawn out above are assembled and some additional speculative linkages sug-gested, we can end up with a causal network as a representation of the theoretical model explaining the advice given on how to do strategic planning. The causal network is displayed in Figure 5.4.

More accurate

Causal network inferred from guidance on how to do strategic planning

It might be expected that implicit theories embedded in practical guidance might reflect specific experiences or learning. In the case of the Turkish devel-opment of strategic planning in public administration it has already been noted that the political will to carry out the reforms may have been influenced by the crisis in 2001. Therefore it might be expected that the strategic planning would have been intended to reinforce discipline in public financial management, which would in turn explain the emphasis on costing and resource planning as part of the process. Furthermore, a team of Turkish civil servants in the centre of government had carried out a study visit to the Republic of Ireland and knew about the Irish government’s Strategic Management Initiative in 1994. An eval-uation of the Initiative, published in 2002, by PA Consulting Group, produced

a report that included a reference to criticisms in the early days of the initiative that suggested that strategic documents had an academic manner, were stylized in tone and weak on attention to the organizational environment (PA Consult-ing, 2002). It might be observed that if Turkish civil servants followed the State Planning Organization’s Guide meticulously they would most likely produce strategic plans that would have been less vulnerable to similar criticisms.

It should be borne in mind that in other circumstances the concern might be that there was an excess of realism among civil servants. At times political lead-ers want those engaged in strategic planning in ministries and elsewhere in the public sector to challenge the taken-for-granted assumptions about situations and to be radical in formulating strategic options for the consideration of politicians.

STRATEGIC PLANNING – GOVERNMENT OF