On the Quality and Acceptance of Plans Drawn by a Consortium

Abstract

Laws and current practices often dictate participation by different organizations in one planning process. Plan sponsors form a "consortium" to represent different viewpoints on a planning group. In this study, consortium groups were made up of people drawn from several organizations and/or people with conflicting points of view. For comparison, members of "conventional" planning groups were drawn from the plan sponsors' immediate staff to ensure similarity of views. To gain insights into the effectiveness of the consortium as a vehicle for planning, the merits of plans drawn by consortium planning groups and by conventional planning groups were compared. To generalize the findings, several planning topics were addressed and several organizations participated. Consortia representing several distinct organizations were found to make plans of superior "quality" and "acceptance" (p < .05). Neither plan quality nor acceptance was enhanced when the consortium represented staff within an organization that had conflicting roles. In both cases, the co-optative benefits of a consortium seem overstated. Consortium planning groups promoted conflict, not endorsement via participation (p .05). Some guides for cooperative planning are drawn from these findings.

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