Maybe it's just that we have different views on which decisions are political and which are managerial. Or maybe it's because universities (where I have gotten most of my experience with how bureaucracies work) are qualitatively different from other kinds of organisations. Or maybe it's that the "strategies" I've been presented with have been worked out less as coherent policies than as ways to provide air cover for middle managers to ride their hobby horses. And then shout down criticism with a claim that they have a mandate to do so in The Strategy(TM) that's been approved at the policy level. All those are most certainly possible.
- Jake 640 kiloton should be enough for anybody
Some managers will do their step of the process better than others - e.g. convert a high level strategy into a lower level strategy, or a lower level strategy into a more cost effective action plan - and thus review processes are required to evaluate what worked better or worse and then to deploy the better plans more widely to the exclusion of the worse etc.
All decision trees in an organisation are amenable to process analysis, design and review. It just isn't done very well in a lot of organisations, and hardly at all in some of the public sector organisations I have experience of.. notes from no w here
To some extent, the answer is "all of the above" - but that becomes a pretty delicate balancing act when a minister is directly at cross-purpose with the users and employees of a public institution...
