What is planning?

According to Wikipedia “Planning” in organisations is both the organisational process of creating and maintaining a plan; and the psychological process of thinking about the activities required to create a desired goal on some scale. As such, it is a fundamental property of intelligent behavior.

“Take hold of the future or the future will take hold of you.” Patrick Dixon, author of Futurewise

What is participatory planning?

Participatory planning involves conducting planning with the involvement of a number of people. These people can be a whole range of different stakeholders, and it obviously depends on the nature of the thing we are trying to develop or refine, and the context as to who should be involved. The role of the consultant in this process is that of facilitator and coach. All of Clear Horizon consultants, and many of our associates are trained facilitators, facilitation is a core tool of our work. We do run some training on facilitation, please see our training page.

Origins. Paulo Freire and Kurt Lewin are key pioneers of participatory planning. Freire’s belief that poor and exploited people can and should be enabled to analyze their own reality was a fundamental inspiration for the participatory planning movement. Lewin’s relevance lay in his integration of democratic leadership, group dynamics, experiential learning, action research and open systems theory, and his efforts to overcome racial and ethnic injustices. More recently, Robert Chambers has become a key champion of participatory planning and was a key leader in the creation of ‘Participatory Learning and Action’ (PLA) which is a dominant technique in overseas development:

“In PLA a key concept is to hand over the stick (or pen or chalk): facilitating investigation, analysis, presentation and learning by local people themselves, so they generate and own the outcomes and also learn. “

Most of the participatory planning work that Clear Horizon facilitates involves group workshops although often we facilitate inquiry before the group workshop. Sometimes we facilitate large group workshops with up to 200 people attending.

Why is participation important?

At Clear Horizon we strongly believe in harnessing the expert knowledge and values of stakeholders and providing them with collective forums to makes sense of a situation and to develop an effective plan of action. In this way, knowledge products are directly relevant to the context while ownership is fostered amongst stakeholders in relation to existing and successive projects. A key way to achieve this dual outcome is through participation

Types of participatory planning that Clear Horizon uses

Clear Horizon uses a wide number of techniques to facilitate participatory planning. These include:

• Program Logic. Is a visual model of how a group believes their activities will lead to long term outcomes. At clear horizon we have our own home-grown approaches including “people-centred logic”, a generic results hierarchy approach, and a tailored logic model for natural resource management.
• Outcomes Frameworks. A model of how long term outcomes fit together, typically at the organisation level
• Strategic Planning. A process for developing a plan for a number of years to help mobilize groups in a common direction
• Appreciative Inquiry (AI). A strengths based approach for organisational, or community based planning that seeks to find out what is working and do more of it!
• Open Space Technology. A large group workshop process that sees many people setting their own agenda.
• Participatory Learning and Action. A planning process that involves a whole range of visual and oral analysis tools. Often used in overseas development
• Participatory Action Research. A facilitated process that involves both research and action, a great way to create solutions together in a complex environment.