Planning

Consultants look at an old-fashioned plan-board. Together they discuss the work, who does what, and when.
Nowadays computers may produce schedules, but the details must be discussed live with the whole team.

Planning is the way most organizations work to do big projects. It is thinking about what needs to happen, and then making a detailed plan. It may include a schedule.

All humans plan to some extent: it is a fundamental property of intelligent behaviour. In big organisations and government planning is a main activity. It combines forecasting developments with scenarios of how to react to them.

Forecasting is predicting what the future will look like, whereas planning predicts what the future should look like.

The "nuts and bolts" of planning are the documents, diagrams, and meetings, the objectives and the strategy to be followed. Beyond this, planning has a different meaning depending on the context in which it is used.

The counterpart to planning is self-organization, when order emerges spontaneously out of seeming chaos.

Planning Media

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  The striatum; part of the basal ganglia; neural pathways between the striatum and the frontal lobe have been implicated in planning function.

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  Animation of a four disc version of the Tower of Hanoi

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  Screenshot of the PEBL psychology software running the Tower of London test

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  Post-it Notes and written text on a whiteboard, articulating a plan

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  Example of planning process framework