![]()
I. Foundations for All Planning
Planning is. You can’t escape it. Life is a journey, a continuous series of trips from here (is) to there (will be). Whether as one individual, an organization, or a whole society, we exist within an array of currents and circumstances that are constantly moving and changing. If we want to have some control over this journey, we must decide where we want to end up (goals) and how to go there—or at least part way (course of action).
The alternative is a vagabond model (“a wandering from place to place without settled habitation”). Drift with the current, taking your chances on where it may lead you. Plankton does this (and often ends up in the belly of a goal-directed whale). This is a perfectly legitimate philosophy, existentialism. However, most of us, most of the time, prefer to have something to say about it.
Chapter 1 offers an overview of the immensely diverse area of “planning,” a basic generic model, and, in fairness, the rationales for not planning.
There is no single consensus model of the proper way to plan. In real life, each plan is unique, tailored to the particular situation, with a blend of approaches and techniques. How do you talk about it if it is never quite the same twice? Some classical music etudes offer a half-dozen variations on a theme. The basic model used here is the unadorned “theme.” The remainder of the book is variations on it.
No one operates in a vacuum. All planning is guided, consciously or unwittingly, explicitly or implicitly, openly or covertly by a set of VIBES: where you and “they” are coming from, both literally and figuratively: Values, Interests, Beliefs, Ethics, and Slant.
Chapter 2 addresses value choices, interests, beliefs about what the world is really like, and other slants. Chapter 3 picks up on ethical considerations, particular in relation to distributional justice, whether the end justifies the means, and ways to decide a mixed bag of good and bad in gray-area ethics.
Chapters 4 and 5 demonstrate how different beliefs and ways of thinking affect one’s view of reality, which in turn dramatically limits and colors the planning decisions. Chapter 4 contrasts the planning implications of one’s worldview and systems model. A Newtonian physics view of the world as a predictable mechanism carries very different planning implications from a social systems theory modeled on a living organism. The same is true for our view of what people and society are really like ( Weltanschauung). Our approach will be affected by whether we see the setting as a predatory jungle, a benign fellowship, or a corporate body that transcends individual interests.
Chapter 5 explores how the way we think affects what we look for, how we look for it, what we actually see, how we process it, and the conclusions we draw. Our intake approaches include the scientific method, the clinical method, heuristic trial and error, and experiential intuition-insight. Bounded (narrowly confined) and nonbounded (open-ended) rationality each have their proper place. A broad dilemma for any planning is how to reduce impossibly complex situations to manageable proportion without losing important data and insight—and how we draw conclusions from what we see.
![]()
Chapter 1
Introduction: What is Planning?
My interest is in the future
because I am going to spend the rest of my life there.
—C. F. Kettering
There is nothing permanent except change.
You can’t step in the same river twice.
—Heraclitus
To Plan
I finished high school early and went away to college, leaving my hometown and all my school friends. When I came back for Christmas, everything seemed the same, except that I was no longer part of it. I felt nostalgia for the solid, stable, comfortable world I had left.
I know a tear would glisten
If once more I could listen
To that gang that sang “Heart of My Heart.”
—B. Ryan, 1926
Ten years later all but one of the old gang has dispersed to seek their fortunes in California, Kansas, New Jersey, and other exotic places. The typewriter factory closed, and laid-off workers moved away. A high-tech business moved in, bringing new folks with different life styles. Had I stayed put I would be in a different place anyway.
Life is a continuous journey from here (is) to there (will be), in a river where currents and circumstances are constantly moving and changing. Since all of our “heres” are moving too, we cannot avoid going to some “there.” Your only choice is whether you “go with the flow” wherever the drift takes you or, by planning, take a hand in it.
What Is Planning?
My dictionary* says planning is “any method of thinking out actions or purposes beforehand.” It is deciding where you want to go (your “there”) and how to get there from here.
Koontz and O’Donnell (1972, p. 113) offer a more elaborate definition:
Planning is deciding in advance what to do, how to do it, when to do it, and who is to do it. Planning bridges the gap from where we are to where we want to go. It makes it possible for things to occur which would not otherwise happen. Although the exact future can seldom be predicted and factors beyond control may interfere with the best-laid plans, without planning events are left to chance. Planning … is the conscious determination of a course of action, the basing of decisions on purpose, facts, and considered estimates.
Planning is future oriented. It is something you want to get to. It assumes that the future is sufficiently predictable to act.
It is proactive, taking initiative to change things, either to solve a problem or exploit an opportunity.
Planning itself is a dynamic, fluid process not a product. It usually produces draft road maps or blueprints along the way. As the planning process continues, these draft “plans” are updated, revised, and reprinted as needed. “Planners tend to forget too often that the map is not the terrain” (Hudson 1979, pp. 392–93).
Planning uses conscious, organized, rational analysis to size up the situation, choose goals and objectives, and select doable means. However, while the process is analytical, the information it uses includes direct experience, intuition, insight, and common sense along with systematic scientific data.
It is closely related to three other “P’s”:
- A policy is “any governing principle, plan, or course of action.” Policy planning is development of an overall framework for specific plans. This incorporates such areas as beliefs and values, mission, long term goals, boundaries, and rules. It is sometimes called strategic planning.
- A program is “an outline of work to be done; a pre-arranged plan of procedure.” Program planning is development of medium-to short-range objectives and the means to carry them out. This is sometimes called tactical planning. (In administration, it can also mean an ongoing mechanism to carry out a set of activities within the policy framework.)
- A project is “a unique piece of work having a finite life and producing an identifiable product or achieving a specific aim on time and within specified resource limits” (Canada, 1982, p. 82). Project planning is the nitty-gritty of achieving a concrete objective.
Where is Planning?
Planning is applicable to all areas of life, large and small, long term or short, societal or individual. For instance, my own planning efforts have variously included:
- A Department of Labor youth work training program.
- Grocery shopping for the coming week.
- Attaining gender equality for clergy in a mainline denomination.
- Building a cottage on Cape Cod.
- A large corporation’s program for philanthropy and community support.
- Assuring adequate personal retirement income.
- A mandatory national program-accounting standard for social agencies.
- A trip from Omaha to the Florida Keys.
- Rebuilding a graduate professional school to regain its accreditation.
- Helping a graduate student design her own tailored Plan of Study.
- Writing this book.
Who Plans
Many fields and professions claim planning as their own. They are all correct, for planning belongs to each and is the special province of no single one.
Official Planning Fields
An early entrant into “modem” planning was public physical planning, perhaps dating from Britain’s “city beautiful” planning of model garden suburbs in 1893. By the 1920s, “master planning” had taken root in Chicago. The parent disciplines were architecture and engineering. Today this is called “urban and regional” planning in the United States and “location” planning in Britain. Over time, it has expanded its boundaries from housing to include transportation and the entire physical infra (underlying) structure of an area, the natural environment, and social impacts of physical planning.
Meanwhile, on a parallel track, business, especially large industry, embarked on an engineering-based “scientific management” road in the early twentieth century. This eventually evolved into a cost benefit production planning model. In 1961, it was brought by a business executive, Robert McNamara, to the Department of Defense as “PPBS” (Program Planning and Budgeting System) and quickly spread across the spectrum of domestic programs as well. Although much of it was officially rescinded by a later administration, cost benefit analysis has continued to expand in traditional physical, business, human services, and military planning.
A third parallel planning track involved collaborative planning among human services. It began in 1869 with the first Charity Organization Society in London and progressed to Community Chests and Councils of Social Agencies. Its best known practitioners today are United Ways and Jewish Federations. The primary discipline is a branch of social work, called variously “social administration,” “community organization,” and “macro practice,” which has been taught at the graduate degree level since 1901. It has emphasized informed collaborative decision making and coordination more than the paternalistic expertise approach preferred by the technical planning disciplines.
Influenced by the popular growth of sociology and psychology, the collaborative planning approach emerged in business in the 1920s as part of a human relations school of administration, which focused on employee motivation. It is sometimes called industrial psychology. These have blended into a number of participatory business planning models. A recent popular one has been Total Quality Management (TQM), a grandchild of W. Edwards Deming, who mobilized the United States industrial war in World War II. When his methods were rebuffed by postwar American business, he took them to Japan, as a consultant in rebuilding their economy, from which they were exported to the United States a generation later.
Meanwhile, public human services emerged piecemeal in the early 1900s in Britain and the 1930s in the United States. After World War II, Britain and most other industrial nations embarked on comprehensive social infrastructure planning, called the Welfare State, to complement the physical infrastructure already subject to comprehensive public planning. (The United States rejected this in favor of an approach popularly known as “disjointed incrementalism.”)
Macro (economy-wide) economic planning languished in capitalist countries because of antiplanning free market ideology, which remains strong on rhetoric if not in practice today. The severe economic crises of the 1920s and 1930s opened the door to broad planned interventions, derived from theories of John Maynard Keynes, using broad fiscal and monetary mechanisms.
Targeted economic development planning emerged from other crises. In Russia, the Revolution led to economic Five Year Plans, which achieved some limited successes despite crude technical and administrative limitations. It was more effective in rebuilding economies crippled by World War II. Ironically, although the United States was an initiating partner in this through the MacArthur occupation of Japan and the Marshall Plan in Europe, targeted economic development never quite caught on at home.
Last but far from least, the military have developed what may be the most sophisticated comprehensive rational planning system of all, using game theory and simulation as well as administrative planning methods developed in business.
While many of these sophisticated models are products of the computer age, planning is not new to the military field. At Thermopylae in 480 B.C., 300 Spartans, through the wise tactical planning of General Leonidas, blocked a Persian army reported to be 2.6 million, while, as reported by Herodotus in 450 B.C., loser Xerxes ignored his uncle’s counsel, “Take my advice and do not run any such terrible risk when there is no necessity to do so…. Nothing is more valuable to a man than to lay his plans carefully and well” (Herodotus, The Histories, ea. 446 B.C.).
Planning Professionals
In addition to academic programs which call themselves “planning,” planners seem to emerge regularly from many related fields and disciplines, including:
- Architecture
- Business Administration
- Economics
- Education
- Engineering
- Military Science
- Political Science and Policy Analysis
- Public Administration
- Social change programs, such as the Industrial Areas Foundation
- Social Work
...
