Here’s a slice from Henry Mintzberg’s excellent 1994 book, The Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning. His basic argument is that staff planners, who use cost-benefit analyses based on operational data, are not the right people to create program plans. They cannot turn strategic guidance into resourced actions, nor can they create the strategy itself. Instead, strategic vision must come organically from managers who are intimately involved in the day-to-day work. When speed and context matter, so does the need for experience-based intuition:
And so we conclude that, given (i) that strategy making requires soft information as well as hard, and (ii) that while both planners and managers have access to hard information, it is generally only the managers who have effective access to soft information, it follows that (a) managers must take active charge of the strategy making process; (b) in doing so, they must be able to make use of their tacit knowledge; (c) which means that their intuitive processes must be allowed liberal rein; and (d) for that to happen, they must have intimate contact with, rather than detachment from, their organization’s operations and its external context.
Staff planners, by virtue of their staff role and the data they cannot access, must necessarily be relegated to a true support role in strategy making, particularly concerning the analysis and use of hard data.
While Goldwater-Nichols supposedly put a fair amount of acquisition authority in the Program Manager’s hands, it did not provide the PM the ability to control requirements and funding. Contracting is also out of the PM’s hands, and each functional in acquisition has their own bosses and regulations to answer to.
Most ACAT I programs have acquisition decisions delegated to the service acquisition executives, while most ACAT II and III are now down at the Program Executive Officer level. That’s a good shift, but I haven’t really seen any research on the impacts or benefits derived. Unfortunately, it is usually bad things that get caught and press.
The consequence of what Mintzberg is saying, however, is that the PEOs should be the center of ultimate means-ends conversion. Analysts in service staffs, in service headquarters, and in OSD would collect and analyze data to find seams or gaps between the PEOs and CCMDs. They could coordinate and adjudicate disputes, set priorities. But they wouldn’t direct every requirement and program plan. They wouldn’t micromanage tradeoffs from afar where context has been lost along the way as data is aggregated into ever more useless buckets.
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