Planning under pressure.
The strategic choice approach

Planning under Pressure offers managers, planners, consultants and students a comprehensive and authoritative guide to the Strategic Choice Approach, which has gradually been attracting worldwide recognition as a fresh, versatile and practical approach to collaborative decision-making under uncertainty.
Starting from basic principles, the book uses helpful diagrams and clear explanations to demonstrate practical ways of approaching daunting decision problems; of devising possible ways forward; and of working effectively towards agreed courses of action. Along he way, decision makers are helped to cope with diverse sources of uncertainty – technical, political, managerial – in a strategic manner.
In this extended third edition, the authors have added short contributions from 21 users from seven countries. These new contributors present lessons from their varied experiences in adapting the Strategic Choice Approach to guide decision-making and learning in settings ranging from the re-routing of a controversial city carnival procession to national policy for the management of nuclear waste.

CONTENTS

• Authors’ preface to the third edition
Foreword to the third edition
• Authors’ preface to the second edition
Authors’ preface to the first edition

A quick access guide

Foundations
• Working into problems
• Working towards decisions
• Orientations
• Skills in shaping
• Skills in designing
• Skills in comparing
• Skills in choosing
• Practicalities
• The electronic re source
• Extensions in process management
• Invention. Transformation and interpretation
Learning from others (by 21 invited contributors)
• The development challenge

Bibliography

index

ABOUT THE AUTHORS: 

John Friend is co-author of two earlier books on strategic choice and inter-organizational planning. Gradually forsaking his early schooling in mathematics, he spent a decade in industrial operational research before joining the Tavistock Institute in 1964. Since becoming a freelance consultant in 1986, he has held visiting research professorships at the universities of Sheffield and Lincoln. He has recently developed interactive software based on the Strategic Choice Approach, while also pioneering the use of participatory decision-centred methods in international development and community empowerment.

Allen Hickling has a professional background in architecture and city planning, and practised in North America before joining the Tavistock Institute in 1971. From 1980 he worked for two decades as an independent decision process consultant, focusing in particular on multi-cultural projects to engage stakeholders in the development of environmental policies at local, national and international levels. He has designed and facilitated planning workshops in 29 countries in six continents, while introducing many of his collaborators to the skills of process management he has acquired