What are the components of planning process?

The mental activity of planning does not fit readily in the categories of Rasmussen: Skill-based (SB), Rule-based (RB), Knowledge-based (KB). Both the complexity and the degree of uncertainty about the future, is what determines where the activity fits. Common planning (like planning where to go to lunch) is more on the lines of SB. But this chapter focuses more on RB and KB.

There are three major components of the planning process: a limited attention resource, a set of mental operations that act upon this database and schemas. But input and output functions are also important for linking the planner to the world.

The Working Database is limited in capacity and also continuously variable in content. It contains three types of information:

• Information which has been spontaneously thrown up by active schemas, which do not have to be plan-relevant.
• Information which has been called up from the schema base.
• Information that is derived directly from the environment (via input).

There are three inter-linked operations involved in planning (mental operations): selection, judgement and decision-making. The contents of the working database can be selected form schemas or from the immediate environment. Judgement can be of two kinds; those related to goal setting and those related to goal achievement. Lastly, decisions are made based on the goal and the actions that are needed to achieve that goal.

The planning process can be broken down in 4 stages:

• Setting the objectives
• Searching for alternative courses of action
• Comparing and evaluating alternatives
• Deciding upon the course of action

Schemas are involved in all stages and contribute to all kinds of information. The uncalled-for (spontaneous) information are more likely to include emotionally charged material, which can be activated by the situation or through outputs from recently used schemas. Three categories of sources of bias are categorized that can lead to planning failures, which are mentioned below.

Sources of Bias in the Working Database: It could be that the database will only show a small fraction of the information that is relevant for that situation. Another situation is that of the several variables, the database can only show 2 or 3 at the same time, but the planning process can’t be sustained for more than a few seconds and when it proceeds the content is probably different. Another type of bias is that planning is clouded by past experiences, which gives the variability of future events. Lastly, the information that is called into the database is biased in favour of past successes but also in favour of recently activated schemas.

Sources of Bias in Mental Operations: Planners are mostly guided by things in the past and less by chance, as result they will plan for less events than are likely to occur. Planners also give more attention to information that has emotional impact and are heavily influenced by their own theories. Predicting and assessing the population based on data and detecting many types of co-variations, are both things that planners are not very good at. Lastly, planners: will be subject to the halo effect: they have problems processing two separate orderings of the same people or objects, tend to have a simplistic view of causality and tend to be overconfident in evaluating the correctness of their knowledge.

Schematic Sources of Bias: This kind of bias shows itself after the planning has been completed but before it is executed. A completed plan is not only a set of directions for future actions but also a theory about the future state of the world. Because of this, it is unwilling to change when the more complex the plan gets. Dominating all these features is a strong urge to make sense of all the plan features, called effort after meaning.

What is collective planning and what are its failures?

As you might know, most of our plans are the product of organizations and groups, fittingly called collective planning. An influential theory of this type of planning is Behavioural Theory of the Firm by Herbert Simon, and is based on his principle of bounded rationality: The capacity of the human mind for formulating and solving complex problems is very small compared with the problem whose solution is required for objectively rational behaviour in the real world.

This principle gives us insight in the process where organizational planners have to compromise in their goal setting because the best possible outcomes aren’t always doable. This limitation is called satisficing and it is the tendency to select satisfactory rather than optimal courses of action.

Richard Cyert and James March did not agree with the rationality that was assumed by Herbert Simon. They proposed that there are four general rules of thumb/heuristics in the planning process:

• Quasi-resolution of conflict
• Avoidance of uncertainty
• Problematic search
• Selective organizational learning

Downs worked this out in more detail and created a theory that explains decision-making in large organizations and identified four self-serving biases that he found overlapped in all officials. Each official tends to change the information he passes up upwards in the hierarchy; mostly they exaggerate and make the data more favourable to them. Also the degree to which an official will seek out additional responsibilities and accept risks and the degree to which he complies with the directions from above, is dependent on how much they will help him achieve his personal goals or how much it favours his interest. Another thing an official is biased for is how much the policies and actions are in his own interests.

Climbers are officials that are strongly motivated to invent new functions for their departments to invent new functions for their departments, and to avoid economies. Conservers are biased against any changes in the status quo. Organizations are more likely to make planning failures than individuals, but there are some similarities in the underlying error tendencies: organizations also plan based on a limited database, organizations have biases because of the over-use of labour-saving heuristics and both show themselves to be prisoners of the past and routines.

This groupthink syndrome that he studied was characterized by 8 main symptoms:

• An illusion of invulnerability, creating extreme optimism and taking more risks.
• Collective efforts to rationalize away warnings that might have let to reconsideration of the plan.
• Belief of the rightness of the group’s intentions.
• Stereotyped perception of the opposition.
• The exertion of group pressure if a group member deviates from the collective stereotypes, illusions or commitments.
• Self-censorship of any doubt felt by individual members.
• Shared illusion of unanimity.
• The emergence of mind guards, members who see it as their job to protect the group from any contrary opinions or adverse information.

The powerful forces of the perceived togetherness from a group, makes the perceived possibility unthinkable, and if not unthinkable than unspeakable.