Strategic planning: A design approach for public diplomacy

A. Introduction

“How do we get from where we are to where we want to be, without being struck by disaster along the way?” -Paul H. Nitze

As one public diplomacy scholar asserts, “Strategists are people who seek to solve problems and make choices related to a desired future.” ¹ PD professionals are strategic thinkers and planners. Their work must connect to broader strategic goals. This connection explains the choices PD practitioners make about tactics, resources, and activities to achieve policy outcomes.

To think and act strategically, PD professionals must set priorities and ensure that their resources, practices, and goals align with mission objectives. Strategic planning enables PD practitioners to maximize their impact on U.S. foreign policy by using their expertise to engage foreign audiences effectively. This allows them to shape policy, collaborate across the mission, and adjust to changing circumstances.

A clear strategy brings teams together around a shared vision and guides them toward partnerships that help achieve U.S. foreign policy goals. Strong strategies also enable PD professionals to design programs and initiatives that can be evaluated for impact, adjusted as needed, and meaningfully contribute to the broader goals of the mission, the State Department, and the nation.

B. Exercising judgment

Thinking strategically results in taking purposeful action in response to strategic and policy guidance, understanding the environment, thinking critically and creatively about how to achieve goals, advocating for and allocating resources appropriately, and adapting in the face of uncertainty and change.

Strategists and planners operate in a world with incomplete information. PAOs may be working with an ICS that does not currently reflect the mission’s priorities or that does not fully articulate the U.S. foreign policy objective at stake. There may be conflicting priorities between Washington and the mission’s front office, or conflicting guidance from Washington. In light of these challenges, strategic planning requires that we ask difficult questions; think clearly about costs, risks, and benefits; analyze trade-offs; and make difficult decisions. In short, strategic thinking is about the exercise of expert, professional judgment in complex contexts.

What is strategic planning?

Strategy is about explaining how resources (what you have), actions (what you plan to do), and goals (what you want to achieve) are connected. “Principles of Public Diplomacy” explains how policy, strategy, and tactics work together. When someone can show clearly how their planned action will lead to the desired outcome or make a meaningful change, then the plan has solid reasoning and has sufficient detail. When initiatives and activities lack sufficient planning and strategic framing, it is difficult to ensure that U.S. resources–provided by the U.S. taxpayer–are being responsibly managed. The results of weak causal logic range from activities and initiatives being irrelevant to a strategic problem (the best case) to their actively working against a strategic objective (the worst case).

Choosing the best strategy begins with understanding the relationships you see between means, ways, and ends. While we are moving toward more data-and evidence-driven decisions, our logic is often informed by our experiences and analogies, and it’s often implicit. For example, U.S. foreign service officers may take an experience from their last post and use it to frame or understand a challenge at their current post. LE staff may have a finely honed sense of how to reach a particular audience segment based on their knowledge of local culture and trends. Experience provides important evidence for decision making, but it must be paired with data and evidence from other sources. Thinking strategically and working to effect change in the real world requires the application of judgment on the part of planners.

Figure 2. Ends-Ways-Means

As you move to link strategy and tactics, you need tools and processes to help you make causal links clear and meaningful, and to coordinate and prioritize various tactical engagements to create strategic coherence. At overseas posts, the ICS represents the most detailed formal strategic guidance from which PD practitioners pull to implement their work. Joint Regional Strategies (JRS) also represent strategic guidance for PD professionals. For Functional Bureaus, the equivalent source is the FBS. Posts may also receive strategic guidance from their chiefs of mission and take direction from other key leaders in the Department and administration.

Strategic documents in particular provide PD professionals in the field with a broad, whole-of-mission strategic framework that is focused on identifying and enumerating goals and objectives. Using them to inform strategic planning can help PD practitioners focus their efforts around widely cleared, vetted, and available language, which can help them create internal coherence and buy-in as they develop long-term plans. This chapter focuses on using the ICS as a starting point for strategic planning, focusing on the the first three elements of the PD Framework: Apply Policy in Context, Analyze Audiences, and Develop Plans.

C. What is design thinking? An overview

Industrial designers, architects, and planners first popularized design thinking or design approaches as a way to solve complex challenges.   Design thinking has since taken root in many industries and sectors. In the private sector, a design approach focuses on empathy and understanding of the people who are affected by an issue or who will use a product or service. It emphasizes clear problem definition, quick prototyping, testing, and iteration. Design thinking is one way to tackle problem-solving, especially around problems that are ill-defined, loosely structured, complex, and dynamic. A design approach is widely used in the public relations field, for example in designing public health campaigns or other initiatives designed to influence attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors. Military organizations also have adapted and developed a type of design-oriented thinking, often referred to as operational design, in much of their doctrine to fill the gap between strategy and planning.² Design approaches are useful for PD practitioners because they face complex problems in unique environments, develop coordinated efforts in response to these challenges, and have a focus on human relationships and interactions.

Design thinking provides practitioners with a creative and deliberative way to arrive at potential (if partial) solutions to a problem. For PD practitioners, it emphasizes understanding the perspectives and needs of the audiences, actors, and stakeholders involved in an effort to make progress toward an identified ICS sub-objective or other priority. The processes outlined below are, in many cases, adapted from military operational design; that language (wherever possible) has been retained and will enable interagency coordination and cooperation.

Public diplomacy professionals can borrow from design thinking approaches to facilitate creative and critical problem-solving, promote people-centered planning and programming, and ensure their work is relevant to supporting and advancing U.S. foreign policy and national security objectives. Within the PD world, design thinking and approaches should be substantially focused on audiences.  However, a PD “audience” is different from a private sector “customer.”  PD practitioners identify, analyze, segment, and engage with foreign public audiences to provide a service, advancing U.S. foreign policy to the American people.   

But using this approach does not have to be limited to the PD section. Public diplomacy should be part of a whole-of-mission approach to advancing and achieving U.S. policy objectives. In fact, the most effective planning efforts will involve stakeholders from many sections and offices within the post. The approach outlined below can also be a model for integrated planning. How will the PD section work with the Pol-Econ section? What role will USAID play? How will the Defense Attaché Office or U.S. military be involved? What other agencies have a presence, and how does their work contribute to achieving the objective? Working in this way enables integration and synchronization at the highest levels, making the mission’s work more focused and efficient. This section provides a brief overview of the design approach for public diplomacy. The “Design Approach” is explored in more depth, with examples and steps for using it in the context of a PD section.

A series of simple questions can guide a design-driven approach to problem-solving:

1. What are we trying to accomplish?
2. What is going on right now?
3. What do we want things to look like when we’re done?
4. What is the problem we need to solve?
5. How do we get from here to there?

Written in a different way, as steps in a process, it might look something like the structure below. Each part of the process includes specific analysis of the policy objective, the environment and context, and the audiences for potential PD engagement.

1. Identify, understand, and clarify the U.S. policy goal, guidance, and direction.
2. Understand and visualize the current environment.
3. Identify potential audience groups who are affected by and influential on an issue or topic.
4. Map out or visualize the environment, systems, structures, processes, and networks in which influential and affected groups operate.
5. Understand and visualize the desired end state and future environment.
6. Conduct preliminary research to describe the priority audience groups whose changed attitudes, beliefs, or behaviors are most important to achieving the desired end state.
7. Map out or visualize the desired future environment, systems, structures, processes, and networks in which these priority audience groups operate.
8. Write a problem statement.
9. Develop an approach.
10. Select the most relevant and realistically reachable priority audience group(s) that you want to reach through your initiative.
11. Brainstorm potential initiatives to reach your selected audiences and advance your policy objectives.
12. Evaluate and identify initiatives that will address the identified problem and priority audience groups.

The first three steps might collectively be understood as a situation analysis. A policy-centered, audience-focused design approach for public diplomacy emphasizes understanding, especially understanding of the policy guidance, of the current environment, of the desired future environment, and of stakeholders and potential audiences as part of the environment, even before defining the problem, and certainly before jumping in to figure out what actions you want to take. Given that it can take some time to conduct an initial situation analysis, the process can sometimes seem like it prioritizes theorizing over doing, which can be uncomfortable for practitioners; but deep understanding, based in research and evidence, pays dividends. The results of the situation analysis help to understand and craft the problem statement, and then, the approach and solutions. As the environment changes, as you gain information from executing initiatives and activities, or even as policy goals shift, you can revisit this series of questions. These questions allow you to think flexibly about an issue. When conditions change, you will be well prepared to reframe and iterate.

This process operates at a fairly high level, moving from advancing an ICS sub-objective to identifying initiatives (and potentially some activities, as part of developing the approach). But the questions introduced here are useful throughout the planning process. You can also apply deliberative questioning at many stages in the process of planning, implementation, and adaptation. One key question is, “How do we know?” By asking yourself this question as you consider your operating environment, strategic objectives, initiatives, and activities, you will be well on your way to making decisions that are informed by research, evidence, and data. Developing a culture of asking questions and then seeking evidence to answer them is a critical step in developing cultures that embrace learning and are well-situated for strategic planning and flexible adaptation when the situation requires them.

Desk research

Several steps during the design and planning process involve “desk research,” including situation analysis and audience analysis. Unlike “original research” where a researcher conducts a unique study that generates new knowledge, desk research is the process of searching for existing and available data and evidence on a specific topic, issue, or audience. Desk research is about finding, analyzing, synthesizing, and applying knowledge gained from other people, rather than conducting original research yourself. If you are searching in a database or library catalog, or even just doing a basic search on the internet, you are conducting desk research. Desk research is helpful in understanding the policy objective, defining a PD problem to be solved, mapping the current environment, learning more about an audience, or verifying an underlying assumption or hunch. One important consideration in conducting this type of research is the reliability, credibility, and validity of the sources you are finding. For example, a report from a well-known think tank will provide a different kind of information than that provided by a blog post written by a local university student. Both of these might be useful sources, but you would analyze them differently.

D. Developing a design mindset

Design thinking offers a deliberative, purposeful, and inclusive approach to problem-solving that can be broken down into discrete steps. More importantly, it offers leaders and team members a design mindset: a philosophy or conceptual way of thinking about a problem and possible solutions. A design approach relies on the creativity, perspectives, and collaboration within the team, and it is enhanced when the team brings a range of backgrounds, experiences, and expertise.

A design approach works if everyone involved, from the top down, values and embraces:  

• Collaboration and dialogue 
• Listening as much as speaking 
• A commitment to building strong, well-rounded teams
• Competing ideas and perspectives 
• A sense of humility and willingness to learn from mistakes  
• The importance of research and data  
• Intense curiosity about the way the world works  
• The concept of a “learning organization”  
• A deep understanding of resource assets and constraints  
• A shared understanding with those who will implement the plan

A design approach cannot work if any of the following holds true:  

• There is a lack of enthusiastic support from leadership 
• Only one “voice” dominates 
• Expertise is not respected  
• There is no commitment to iteration and adaptation 
• There is no tolerance for failure or ambiguity 
• The conceptual vision is not clearly communicated

The PAO's support plays the most important role in developing a design mindset within the team. The PD section can also work to cultivate a design mindset within the broader mission, as they are primed and trained to ask questions about goals and priorities, understanding the environment, defining problems, and developing solutions. When a design mindset is also supported by bureaus and offices in Washington, the possibilities for effective strategic planning; evidence-based decision making; and more effective policy-centered, audience-focused PD initiatives are amplified. This amplification occurs when all parts of the PD community share a vision for planning and executing strategically relevant programs designed to achieve specific effects in the real world.

E. The design approach is audience-centered

Effective public diplomacy outreach, messages, and programs have clear target audiences, allowing them to reach those audiences and advance a desired policy objective. Analyzing the most effective target audience involves using data and research to narrow your focus from the entire universe of groups and individuals who may be relevant to a U.S. foreign policy objective, to defining the specific group whose attitudes or behaviors will need to change in order to achieve that objective. Once you have clearly defined your priority audience, you will be able to use that information to develop a message and choose a messenger that is most likely to reach and persuade your priority audience.

Having limited resources means that no initiative can reach all audiences. Audience analysis helps identify the most appropriate audiences, messages, and channels for PD initiatives. It provides a road map for reaching those who are most likely to engage in your desired behaviors identified in the problem statement.

PD initiatives cannot reach everyone, and not every person in a country is going to be influential in helping the mission accomplish its objectives. The best way to allocate scarce resources is to identify priority audiences.

Just as there are barriers to change, there are also people who can influence others to change. Identifying the key influencers who can persuade your priority audience to change will allow you to reach those groups, even when they may not be open to changes suggested by the United States. Refer to the mapping findings in the desk research and situation analysis steps and identify the people and processes that may influence the priority audiences’ behaviors.

By considering the influences who are valued by the priority audience, you gain insights into who might be the most influential in moving your priority audience forward. Importantly, the PD initiative may not require direct contact with a priority audience, it may be more effective to reach this audience through an interlocutor or an implementing partner, or through other networks and contacts. While this group of “influencers” may become your target for PD initiatives, it is important to have considered and remain aware of your priority audience. Remember, your priority audience is the group whose attitudes or behaviors need to change to achieve your policy goal.

Key audience definitions

Audience: A group of people who generally exhibit a common set of attitudes, behaviors, or traits, organized around a topic or issue.

Audience analysis: The evidence-based process to identify, select, and define groups whose attitudes or behaviors need to change to achieve a policy objective, and to determine effective ways to communicate with and engage them.

Audience research: The process of conducting research to identify an audience and learn their beliefs, preferences, behaviors, etc. Audience research can be conducted in many ways (e.g. surveys, focus groups) and should be based on rigorous, established research methodologies appropriate for the goal of the research.

Potential audience: A group of people who are affected by a particular policy or issue. These are the people whose attitudes, knowledge, or behavior you are ultimately looking to change.

Priority audience: An audience that you select for targeted engagement with PD programs, initiatives, messages, or other activities. To identify a priority audience whom you can effectively engage, consider the shared knowledge, attitudes, or behaviors that need to change to achieve the policy goal.

Audience segmentation: The process of identifying distinct characteristics within the priority audience, based on shared characteristics like demographics, psychographics, geography, communication preferences, behaviors, or attitudes.