Value of Consensus-Based Process in California Space Enterprise Strategic Planning and Implementation

Victoria Conner
Principal
Strategic Vitality, LLC

"Engage those most impacted in planning and creating their own transformation"

Every few years since 1998 the California Space Authority (CSA) has facilitated development of a statewide consensus-based, collaborative strategic plan. The organization has just completed the California Space Enterprise Strategic Plan 2007-2010. Each plan has involved at least 200 participants and over 100 organizations from diverse industry sectors as well as from the military, NASA, local, State and Federal government agencies, other nonprofits, education, academia and various workforce domains. While the California Space Authority considers itself "trustee" of California space enterprise strategic planning, it is the California space enterprise community itself, comprised of those stakeholder organizations mentioned above, which "owns" the strategic plan.

This "Participatory Action Research" (PAR) model has as its advantage the fact that it engages those with the most vested interest in driving the process forward and ensuring its success. Borrowed from the public health sector, the PAR model demands both planning and implementation support from its stakeholders.

The six-month process employed in developing the California Space Enterprise Strategic Plan engages every segment of the California space enterprise community, as well as the network touched by the nonprofit California Space Authority. The CSA Board of Directors approves the development process and timeline and receives quarterly updates. The Space Enterprise Advisory Council steps into high gear to provide guidance and direction to the organization's statewide "collaboratives" (committees) which transform into working groups during the Plan development period. Individual interviews and webinars are held to accommodate policymaker and space enterprise VIPs and attract important new voices to the process.

Through numerous iterations, strategic planning topics - key drivers, threats and opportunities, critical issues, recommendations - are considered and reconsidered, with information and identified priorities shared across working groups. Consensus is sought first at each working group level, then at the Advisory Group level, which represents the perspective of all of the working groups. Board members weigh in at every level, as frequent participants of working groups, Advisory Council and the Board itself.

Over the years, the California Space Authority has refined its consensus-based strategic planning model, identifying important characteristics of consensus-based planning, such as a non-hierarchical approach in meetings and decision-making.

CSA has continually improved upon its ability to facilitate the Plan's implementation strategy of distributing implementation responsibility across the enterprise, enhancing consensus continuity from planning and development stages through the implementation stage. Collaboration and consensus have been key implementation success factors in the previous strategic planning periods.

Over the previous strategic planning period, integration was a top consideration: integration of Plan objectives with ongoing space enterprise activity and integration of objectives with CSA organizational activities. The value of the consensus-based approach was that this integration, once focused upon, was not difficult. There was already a natural alignment that simply needed to be tracked and documented.

Extraordinary leverage is a positive advantage of the consensus-based planning approach. By its very nature of involving more participants, more opportunities are identified, more stakeholders are engaged and more success is possible. The 2004 California Space Enterprise Strategic Plan has identified key successes in process and continuity, resource development, advocacy and partnership-building — all as a result of the consensus-based planning model.

Using the PAR or consensus-based strategic planning process is not the easiest strategic planning model to choose. Success factors include constant recruitment between planning and implementation stages, continual revisiting of the value of collaboration and its successes to sometimes cynical incoming stakeholders, ongoing orientation to newcomers, fostering of a common language among diverse communities of stakeholders — public and private, and development of a core group of collaboration champions.

But the rewards are great: no loss of continuity from planning to implementation, broad stakeholder understanding and support, leveraging of resources, cross-fertilization of ideas, a core coalition for advocacy, distributed implementation, and the knowledge that the plan truly represents the views of the stakeholders it serves.

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