June 2006

Pansy Wong has dis­cov­ered a new phrase­ol­ogy in Gov­ern­ment Depart­ments. it is absolutely superb and could eas­ily have been uttered by the immor­tal Sir Humphrey.

The phrase is “Strate­gic Cov­er­sa­tions and here are some examples.

[quote]Min­istry of Social Devel­op­ment:
‘A less tech­ni­cally sophis­ti­cated eval­u­a­tion that can add more to the strate­gic con­ver­sa­tion is of more value than a tech­ni­cally sophis­ti­cated eval­u­a­tion whose results may dis­tract from ensur­ing the most strate­gic use of resources.’

Hous­ing New Zealand:
‘The result of sce­nario plan­ning is not a more accu­rate pic­ture of tomor­row, but bet­ter think­ing and an ongo­ing strate­gic con­ver­sa­tion about the future’.

State Ser­vices:
‘The qual­ity of the strate­gic con­ver­sa­tion within gov­ern­ment is likely to be improved as depart­ments think more strate­gi­cally about their organ­i­sa­tional require­ments and oper­a­tional pri­or­i­ties and methods’.

Min­istry of Eco­nomic Devel­op­ment (MED) State­ment of Intent for 2006 — 2009:
’..our atten­tion has turned to improv­ing the qual­ity of strate­gic think­ing and con­ver­sa­tions … as part of this we have … put more focus on syn­the­sis­ing research to dis­til the impli­ca­tions for our strategy’.

MED again:
‘Think­ing strate­gi­cally is encour­aged in all parts of the min­istry … strat­egy review is also informed by strate­gic con­ver­sa­tion … The min­istry car­ried out a review of lessons that can be learned from the year’s annual strat­egy review process. This involved dis­cus­sions with a range of par­tic­i­pants in the strat­egy review process to obtain and syn­the­sise qual­i­ta­tive views on what parts of the process worked well’[/quote]

Utter twad­dle and trite, Kafkaesque crap uttered by func­tionar­ies of the state on gov­ern­ment spon­sored power trips.