A study on the structure of planning behaviour

Although there is an abundance of literature on planning, it is largely either about how we actually plan, about how we should plan, or about how we should organize our planning, and little effort seems to have been contributed to investigate how we actually organize our planning, which should become the basis for the above three kinds of research. In this paper, we consider first the relationship between planning and decision-making with a simple example (Section 2), and then the benefits and costs of planning more specifically (Section 3). After these preparatory considerations, we postulate a hypothesis which describes planning behaviour of individuals and organizations, with necessary definitions and assumptions (Section 4). Some propositions attained from the hypothesis are also included. For testing the validity of the hypothesis, an organism model of organization which deals with an organization as an open system in the environment is introduced (Section 5.1). We make additional assumptions to let the model plan (Section 5.2), and the behaviour of the model is generally supported by the practitioners and researcher interviewed (Section 5.3). Finally we discussed briefly the methodology employed and the possible applications of the hypothesis (Section 6).