Plan-Making Process with Strategic Choice Approach

This paper aims at introducing the Strategic Choice Approach (SCA), which is one of the technical method for plan-making process.In 1970's in Britain, it had become very hard to make a long-term general planning because of the uncertain change of socio-economic situation. On the other hand, SCA was proposed and has evolved over the last decade and is now becoming to be known among planning practicians in Britain and overseas such as in Germany, Netherlands, Canada, Brazil and so on.To use SCA, an important point is thought not to complete the aim of planning which is first planned, but what to do for decision-making against the problem to be confronted, utilizing experience of the past and any information. It is considered that planning is a continuous learning process and it is important to continue the decision-making at each situation and proposed the decision-making process which has some steps with a view of taking into acount the action to defer some decision as one of a chance to make decision.SCA has 6 steps as a process of plan-making. These are ‘how to choice the problem’, ‘to make clear the shape of the problem’, ‘to choose the alternatives’, ‘to compare the alternatives’, ‘to choose what to do’ and ‘action’. The most important point of SCA is that the process is cyclic. It is permitted to go forward or backward from any step to other step.To make clear the shape of the problem and choose the alternatives, the method called Analysis of Interconnected Decision Areas (AIDA) is used. The problems are devided into some ‘decision areas’, within which some choice called ‘options’ are contained, and between incompatible options of different decision areas ‘option bar’ is drawn. And finally possible combination of options are listed as alternatives. We can make clear the relation between complicated problems to use AIDA.To choose what to do, ‘Commitment Package’ is prepared as the final menu of the plan, which is composed of the action which should be done to correspond with the uncertainty of the decision-making to two parts, what to do now and what to decide later. Using Commitment Package, a process of decision-making is expressed.