The object of this article is the planning process of the Health Secretariat of State of Bahia from January 2007 to July 2009. It describes and analyses this process, discussing the difficulties and the advances to build the planning practice in this institution. It was used documental analyses and systematic registers of lived experience by the authors to do it. The process points for an approach between theory and practice articulating the Strategic-situational focus and the Communicative Action, including the principle of the Social Participation. The analyses explain that the process occurs in a pool of dialogic movements enlaced by the explicative, normative, strategic and tactic-operative moments that finished with the construction of the Health Secretariat of State of Bahia. There is a powerful planning revealed in plurality and multiplicity of approaches used to build a collective "vision of future" in organizations that adopted "plans" like instruments to qualify Government actions.
Public Health; Health planning; Governmental planning; Plans and government programs; Brazilian public health system
