INTRODUCTION

Strategic planning and management is an ancient field of study, with texts dating back to 500 years BC. Traditional educational planning is derived from bureaucratic methods popularized during and after World War II. Using a factory production model, they assume a relatively stable environment that allows planners to focus on issues of allocation and distribution. Planning under these conditions is tactical or reactive. It begins first with the assessment of internal needs, moves to technical/rational goal setting required to meet those needs, and finally identifies the resources needed to meet those needs.

Those days are gone, perhaps for a long time. Planning today occurs in increasingly complex educational environments. Traditional public schools are threatened by legislation for charters and vouchers, creating a more competitive arena for management. These new complex environments destabilize traditional planning because attention shifts from meeting needs of clients to generating resources so that needs can be met. Big difference.

Most of the strategic management literature focuses on institutions in stable or turbulent conditions in stable political structures. Some planning lies outside of these conditions. In emergencies such as natural disasters institutions can collapse. In emergencies such as conflicts, the legal system that holds together the institutional structures can collapse. Planning in an unregulated market may be the dream of many entrepreneurs. Many US reformers see competitive markets as a panacea to improving quality. This naïve view created havoc in Russia.

Too often that dream can turn into a nightmare if the legal system needed to hold the markets together collapses under criminal coercion. In weak governments where laws are not easily enforced, rogue competitors may directly vie with civil communities for the control of security and the access to tax resources. Gang economies often operate as alternative 'protection' in communities with weak civil governments. They don't and won't pay taxes for schools, and often have strong interests in ensuring civil communities have weak enforcement and tax collection systems.

Planning under these conditions falls outside traditional thinking about planning.

Bureaucratic thinking focuses on growth through external technological control of the environment. Mathematics and irrigation worked for the Egyptians. Scientific method and machines worked for Western Europeans in the 19^th century. Americans in the 20^th century used this thinking to control the information environment.

Our cultural ancestors, the Egyptians, lived on a thin green line next to a thin blue line. The borders between the agricultural life next to the Nile and the lifeless desert were stunning. Innovative organizational planning gave rise to irrigation and a need for tight bureaucratic control of the economy. It worked.

Generation after generation of Egyptian children learned to successfully inherit the economic system of their ancestors. They developed mathematics to measure the seasons of the Nile's flooding. They created a way of seeing beauty in the world through strong contrasts: one source of creation-the perfect Father Sun god whose precision and order protected his children from chaos. These command economies worked well for many centuries. Today's bureaucracies are a direct descendent of pharonic command.

Today's children will inherit an economy that is both similar and profoundly different from our Egyptian ancestors. Science, mathematics and technology still make critical contributions to our economic development.

Alas, the inevitability of the seasons can no longer guide it. Our children can't plan for their future in the same way that many Egyptians still do six thousand years later. They can't plan for it because they have to invent it. Big difference.

How do we plan for education when we are inventing the economy as we go along? How do we plan when our technology is changing the future so rapidly that it cannot be predicted? How do we plan when legal structures and civil protection are uncertain?

Today's growing emphasis on strategy for results remains important, but it assumes a stable institutional mandate and formal means for enforcing civility. Unchecked competition leads to bullies. Bullies get results. Do we want our children to learn how to be bullies who get results?

Strategy for results can't work well if the orders for results change so rapidly that the system cannot adequately manage them. A highly divided political and ideological school board can create a very different planning environment from a corporate board clearly focused on a 'bottom line.'

In complex environments negotiated processes take on greater importance. For example, in highly competitive and stressful environments, the need for conscious civility increases.

Civility is not the same as ice. Ice is self-evident. Civility is self-constructed. The laws of physics tell us that if the temperature drops below 32 degrees F, then water will turn to ice. There are no self-evident and timeless laws of physics that can perfectly forecast civil behavior.

Civility is an interpretation. Interpretations are often neither self-evident nor timeless. People with family beliefs construct them. These beliefs are often rooted in culture, language and history rather than science.

In highly complex conditions strategists need to know how to assess these constructed interpretations, both in themselves and others. They need to learn to assess, reflect and act in economically and socially responsible ways. They need to create and use knowledge. The creation of new knowledge can shifts planning horizons away from expected results.

Hence emergent strategy.

In complex planning conditions, it can be very difficult to design and execute a deliberate strategy. Too many unexpected events can intrude on our plans. For example, a school district can spend two years on a strategic plan only to have a new school board fire the superintendent and throw out the plan. Now what?

What direction can we go with what we have? What do we need to do to keep us working for each other's benefit? How do we protect ourselves from bullies?

Emergent strategy focuses on a strategic direction that learns as it goes along. This allows it to take advantage of unforeseen opportunities that might arise.

Learning organizations differ from bureaucratic organizations controlled by external command. The pharaoh was commanded by the vision of the gods. Today's learning organizations rely less on structures of centralized, collective command and more on networks of negotiated communications to develop its strategic intelligence.

January 6, 1999

Maureen W. McClure