Brief introduction to the Strategic Choice Approach to Collaborative Planning

Abstract

This short sequence of 16 PowerPoint slides introduces the philosophy and emphases of the Strategic Choice Approach to planning. This is a decision-focused approach which has now had a wide international influence on the practice of public planning and policy development. It traces its origins to a programme of applied research which originated in Britain the 1960’s within a research programme which brought together contributions from operational research scientists and social scientists. The approach focuses on the challenges faced by people when working together to cope with interrelated decision problems, while confronted by perplexities of evidence, of policy value and of problem structure, yet also by insistent pressures to make progress towards commitments to actions and policy change. On short courses, this kind of introductory summary has become widely used as a prelude to a series of short lectures and group exercises focused on a suite of more specific visual tools for communication which have proved effective in helping planning groups to make incremental progress towards agreed actions and policy change. A PowerPoint file which brings together guidance on these specific lecture modules can be accessed through another link.