Suggesting that strategic planning was dragged out of obscurity solely to promote Vladimir Putin would be like saying that multiplication tables are principally used to improve the image of Central Bank head Viktor Gerashchenko.
Strategic planning, and in a wider sense, strategic vision, in fact date back to ancient civilizations. Their main use then was in warfare, and later, they began to be applied to arts and then science.
The modern world is becoming ever more complicated and dangerous, but people remain as casual in attitude as ever. The number of people who cross themselves only when thunder rolls and deal with problems as they come never drops, while the risks we face are constantly on the rise.
Finding responses to all these challenges is not always so easy, as systems analysis as the foundation of strategic planning is studied by only a small fraction of future leaders and managers. The rest get no more than a few banalities about a "systematic approach." These people later end up being the best targets for all kinds of swindlers who charge huge fees for their innovative developments in whatever the latest "in" planning trend is.
That is why it's good to see the Russian leadership suddenly interested in strategic planning. The only surprising thing is that the public wasn't interested sooner in learning methods of forecasting and planning. It's interesting to note that Putin's doctoral dissertation was on strategic planning.
Today, we need well-mastered methods for multi-level planning of organizational systems, not just debates on strategic planning. Various new official and non-official groups, centers set up by economists and social scientists, work more in the area- of social fantasy — futurism. They write monographs on economic reform and draw up action plans, rather than working on the urgently needed but "boring" business of systemic social technology.
This is a business for specialists in applied systems analysis who would act as scientific coordinators for groups comprised of economists, sociologists, political scientists, psychologists and other specialists.
Current attempts to draw up strategic programs and concepts won't work unless mathematical models for forecasting and planning are used. Without these models, the result will just be more documents on the line of strategies and scenarios that crop up in newspapers instead of realistic steps for implementing strategy-aims. Without these strategy-aims, it won't be possible to introduce objective planning into large systems.
Serious organizations these days don't just come up with missions, aims and tasks; they also arrange them into hierarchical structures, directions for action, strategies, policies, specific programs and subprograms. The players, factors and influence of external economic and political events are also analyzed and incorporated.
The strategic vision of processes at work in the twentieth century was the impetus for the scientific-technological "leap into the future." Well thought out technological planning and process management enabled this progress to be effectively implemented. Atomic and space projects provide a perfect- example. Often, it was enough to improve the education system and 10 or 20 years on, a country would see rapid growth. Good examples here are the A. F. loffe school in Russia between 1910 and 1930, and the development of some sectors of the military-industrial complex from the 1940s to the 1970s.
We think this strategic approach based on breakthroughs is urgently needed by large corporations, the economy and the state. It should harmonize with a general strategic vision and a systemic approach based on clear forecasting and planning technology.