The Municipal Dilemma: Strategic Planning, Potholes, and Asphalt

In many of our towns, people wait years for asphalt to reach their streets. And when paving finally begins, residents feel that the municipality has done something that directly touches their daily lives: dust decreases, vehicle movement improves, and a portion of the hidden cost that families used to pay every day from their nerves, money, and car maintenance is reduced.

But this feeling barely settles before people wake up to the sounds of excavators breaking the new asphalt—this time to extend a water network. The street is opened again, dust returns, traffic is disrupted, and the situation continues for months. After backfilling, another entity comes later to carry out a third job, and the scene repeats, and the street is never the same.

In one case I observed, the period between paving the road and re-excavating it was less than six weeks. The roads department did not know that the water department would dig, and the water department did not know that the road had just been paved. Each department carried out its work according to its approved plan, and each was right within its scope.

And this is precisely where the defect lies: not in the efficiency of the departments, but in the void between them. The flaw does not occur within the department, but in the area that planning is supposed to govern.

Within the municipality, the planning process often proceeds in a known path: each department—roads, water, sewage, electricity, organization—is asked to write what it deems appropriate for its scope, projects, and success indicators. These inputs are then collected into a single document titled “The Municipality’s Strategic Plan.” Each department completes its part in terms of drafting, and then the document moves to its final cover, while the governing questions remain pending.

This is what I call the ritualism of planning: an institutional pattern in which strategic planning is practiced as a formal, periodic ritual that performs symbolic functions—gaining legitimacy and complying with administrative requirements—without leading to a governing decision, or an actual rearrangement of priorities, or a binding allocation of resources, or a tangible change in executive behavior.

In many cases, the plan is merely a compilation of activities and projects distributed over a period of time, without a real diagnosis of challenges, without a clear selection of priorities, and without a binding connection between departments, roles, and resources. Each department works within its plan as if it does not share the same street with others.

And the question that reveals the flaw is simple: What should be implemented first? What should stop? And what should not start before others? At this question, the problem appears: many goals, many projects, while the fundamental defect is the absence of a governing priority that translates into binding decisions for all departments. In this void, each department moves according to its internal logic, preserving its path, budget, and scope, and planning shifts from the function of setting direction to merely collecting and formally coordinating inputs.

Henry Mintzberg accurately described this situation in his book “The Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning” (1994), when he deconstructed what he called “the grand fallacy”: the illusion that combining the plans of units together produces a coherent strategy. Planning—as he showed—may improve the arrangement of what exists, but it does not set direction or create integration; for combining correct parts does not necessarily produce a whole that functions as a single system. Each plan was acceptable in itself, but their sum did not work together.

And the dilemma of “paving then digging” is merely the simplified image of this defect: individual works that are correct, but contradictory in their totality, because the integration that should have linked them was absent from the beginning.

The first thing that must be addressed is to restore the function of planning to its proper place within the municipality. Planning needs a governing framework that defines priorities at the level of the entire town, not at the level of each individual department, and translates them into binding operational decisions, controls the interdependence between departments, and prevents moving to implementation before addressing arrangement and conflict. Only then will the street stop being an arena where departments meet for the first time—after the conflict has become a reality under the asphalt.