Developing strategies is not unlike having children. Many are conceived from committed parentage, and are nurtured in a loving and learning environment. But others are what we call orphans, the product of enthusiastic if short-lived liaisons, and then abandoned to compete for attention alongside others who face a similar fate.

With the current fashion for writing strategies for just about anything that public bodies need to do, it is not surprising that we turn to those who have a talent for such tasks. The classic strategy-writer is probably a policy specialist of some sort with a reasonable turn of phrase and a gift for liberally sprinkling the text with in-vogue buzz-words. He or she also has the political skills to take the pulse of opinion-leaders so that it eventually gets rubber-stamped, published on the internet, a mention in the paper …and then ….what?