Towards Futures Seeking and Communicative Strategy Processes

In Finland, as in many other countries, a system of governance that is leading towards a multiple overlapping negotiation system between various actors at different levels is emerging. Previously quite clear borders of the organisations and decision-making have begun to fade. In a sense, borders will be "fuzzier", and the decisions made in a one organisation concern directly only a part of the wide network of actors, but may have unforeseen results in some other part of it. More decentralised decision-making and self-organising network of actors seems to be suitable for a complex, fast-changing and unpredictable environment, but at the same time it increases complexity, unpredictability and the rate of changes. If properly managed diverse, self-organising models are an opportunity for the efforts of solving contemporary wicked problems, but if managed indifferently we may end up to intolerable fragmentation, where no-one is interested in seeing development holistically, and thus there is also a danger of fragmented and uncoordinated approaches to future oriented activities. There is a danger of overemphasizing parts (single actions) and the whole, i.e. comprehensive future consciousness, may be left behind. During the last three decades strategy has been rather generally considered as an effective means of managing and governing change persistently and linking future to the every day decisions, i.e. linking parts to the whole. In the 1990’s strategic planning has become almost a standard method in the Finnish policy-making. On the other hand the basic assumptions of classical strategic planning have simplified multidimensional social decision-making. Consequently there has been many shortcomings in public sector strategic planning, and the rapidly changing environment challenges once again the forms and practices of strategy. In turn of the millennium we are faced with many wicked problems that need better planning to solve them, but the dilemma is that most of those problems can be solved neither by planning nor without planning. This stresses the need to create new kinds of interactions between the fragments of everyday processes and the whole. Theoretically this paper is based on communicative strategic planning (soft strategy) that balances different sides of future oriented policy-making, i.e. its instrumental, social, communicative and processual aspects. The main starting-point in this paper is that there are many ways in seeing the interconnection between our everyday actions and possible and probable futures. Sente Seinäjoki Unit for Regional Management Studies University of Tampere Dept. of Regional Studies and Environmental Policy