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While it has become ubiquitous in the public sector over the past 25 years, strategic planning will need to play a more critical role in 2020 than it does at present if public managers are to anticipate and manage change adroitly and effectively address new issues that are likely to emerge with increasing rapidity. This article argues that making strategy more meaningful in the future will require transitioning from strategic planning to the broader process of strategic management, which involves managing an agency's overall strategic agenda on an ongoing rather than an episodic basis, as well as ensuring that strategies are implemented effectively. Complementing this move to more holistic strategic management, we need to shift the emphasis of the performance movement from a principal concern with measurement to the more encompassing process of performance management over the coming decade in order to focus more proactively on achieving strategic goals and objectives. Finally, agencies will need to link their strategic management and ongoing performance management processes more closely in a reciprocating relationship in which strategizing is aimed largely at defining and strengthening overall performance while performance monitoring helps to inform strategy along the way.
Guest editors' note: In 1942, the University of Chicago Press published a book edited Leonard D. White titkd The Future of Government in the United States. Each chapter in the book presents predictions concerning the future of U.S. public adminutration. In this article, Theodore H. Poister examines John Vieg's predictions on the future of government ? Unning published in that book, comments on whether Vieg's predictions were correct not, and then looks to the future to examine public administration in 2020.
In 1942, John A. Vieg wrote that after a century and a half of a deliberate lack of public planning in this country, the kind of planning that had arisen out of the New Deal's approach to the Great Depression with vigorous government action was "here to stay" because it was desperately needed, and because the consequences of not planning would be too costly. Since then, planning has evolved over the second half of the twentieth century, with city planning, metropolitan planning, regional planning, advocacy planning, policy planning, program planning, and - transitioning into the twenty-first century - strategic planning...