Planning – Important

Why is Planning & Prioritizing Important?

Planning

“… the idea that we can imagine what the future might look like and how our actions may impact upon imagined states of affairs that constitute this future must provide humans with a huge evolutionary advantage.”^​1​

Our ability to plan & carry out our plans “differentiates us from most other animals,”^​1​ and are considered key instrumental activities of daily living (IADL).^​2​

“Few other activities have as much impact on our lives as planning. People must plan their day-to-day chores (Agre & Chapman, 1990). Organizations must plan new product introduc- tions (Castrogiovani, 1996). Surgeons must plan how operations will be conducted (Kui- pers, Moskowitz, & Kassinger, 1988). Although planning represents a crucial aspect of perfor- mance on many complex, real-world tasks, psy- chology has not, historically, invested much effort in studies of planning”^​3​

“In organizations, and in life outside work, planning is commonly held to be critical to performance.”^​4​

“Nonetheless, the research conducted to date indicates that planning can, at least at times, have a pervasive impact on performance, influencing not only the course of action pursued but also other, more subtle aspects of performance such as learning (Kops & Belmont, 1985), motivation (Smith, Locke, & Barry, 1990), and teamwork “^​3​

“Planning is apparently a crucial aspect of performance when people are confronted with complex, dynamic, demanding tasks in which coordination of activities is required for goal attainment. Accordingly, one might expect planning to have a pervasive impact on performance across a range of situations”^​3​

“Not only is planning a significant aspect of high-level performance in a number of domains; by virtue of its multifaceted, complex influences on performance, as evidenced in its effects on problem solving, learning, motivation, adaptability, and coordination, planning represents a pervasive and unusually powerful influence on performance”^​3​

To successfully carry out any plan, you must not know only what to do, but when to do it.

“Take, for example, the act of cooking a large meal – say, a Sunday roast or a Christmas dinner. There may be relatively little difficulty in planning what to cook, all the ingredients may even be on the kitchen table. However, planning  is still required if one wishes to make sure that all the component elements of the meal are put on to cook at the appropriate times, such that they will all be perfectly cooked and (most critically) ready on the plate at the desired time. That is, the difficulty in planning how to achieve some goals is that they require the synchronization and/or ordering of a number of component actions [prioritization].”^​5​

“Although one should be cautious when making such inferences, when these results are translated to the act of cooking they suggest (reassuringly) that the difficulties in planning and coordinating a meal increase: (1) as the number of component ingredients in the meal is increased; (2) as the com- plexity of the way in which ingredients are assembled is increased. However, when component ingredients are cooked out of view, the component ingredi- ents in a meal require more planning, but are more perfectly served up together. The explanation, in cooking terms, is that ingredients that are cook- ing in view may distract the cook: the cook may watch the cooking ingredi- ents and inadvertently delay the cooking of another ingredient. Finally, the time taken to respond to a problem with individual components of a meal increases with the number of components that are cooking. Problems with the first and last components put on to cook may be more quickly resolved in complex meals than middle components, but t**he resulting effect of a problem on synchronization time is roughly constant whatever the complexity of the meal.”^​5​

Prioritization

“Many of us, for example, mentally prioritize and schedule outstanding “things to do” into the timetables of our day (perhaps as we are getting up in the morning, on our way to work, or as we scurry to make coffee and turn on the computer). We may know only too well what needs to be done (the piles of exam scripts, the urgent e-mail requests for revisions to manuscripts, the pile of references to write), but the difficulty of planning our day is in evaluating the priority of each action, since different tasks take different amounts of time to complete, that the tasks come with various different deadlines, that the consequences of missing some deadlines is of greater importance than others, and that here are other scheduled time commitments in the day. “^​5​

Prioritization and the ordering of information is equally important for planning and organizing our thoughts. For example, if a student reads a dynamically written text (i.e., written in an interesting way “rather than presenting content in a dry, sequential manner”^​6​ on a historical topic and then is called on in class to answer a question such as “What was the most important event in this book?” or “What were the key factors that contributed to World War I?” the student will need to “prioritize and reprioritize information in an effort to make the text useful for their particular purpose,” and “will need to reorganize events… in order to place them in the correct chronology” so that the information can be synthesized and used successfully to answer the teacher’s questions. If the student then needs to write a paper on the subject, they will then need to utilize an outline as an external support for planning, prioritizing, and organizing their arguments into the most persuasive arrangement.^​6​

Education

“Students need to prioritize and reprioritize information in an effort to make the text useful for their particular purpose, an executive process that is often extremely challenging for students with learning disabilities. For instance, in an effort to make history accessible and enjoyable, authors of textbooks may write in a dramatic and imaginative way rather than presenting content in a dry, sequential manner. In order to understand the cause–effect nature of the information, however, students will need to reorganize events from such texts in order to place them in the correct chronology. Each time students are asked to respond to questions such as “What was the most important event in this book?” or “What were the key factors that contributed to World War I?” they are being asked to prioritize and synthesize information. In summary, students with learning disabilities often struggle with the executive function processes that affect a broad array of reading skills”^​6​

“Organization and prioritization are also integral to written expression, which requires the crafting of a complete thought that is independent of context and accessible to the “absent audience.” Many students with learning disabilities struggle with the organization of a broad range of processes and subskills, including the spatial organization of writing on a page, using accurate syntax at the level of the sentence, organizing arguments in order to persuade the reader, and using the traditional structure of introduction, body, and conclusion in an essay “^​6​

“planning aspects of EF are highly predictive of academic functioning in adolescents with ADHD” ^​7​

“For example, Kops and Belmont (1985) found that good and poor students differed in planning skills, whereas Schofield and Ashman (1987) found that gifted students differed from their less gifted counterparts with respect to the use of higher level, more complex planning strategies.” ^​3​

Work/Occupation

“For example, team performance has been found to depend, in part, on planning”^​4​ “Thus, planning may play a central role in organizing perfor- mance in team settings by promoting commu- nication, coordination, effective use of re- sources, role definition, and role integration”^​3​

“Leaders plan how they will respond to crises (.. ). Professionals plan how they will conduct their work”^​4​

“In teams, exchange of case-based knowledge is typically held to occur through networks of inter- personal exchange (Balkundi & Kilduff , 2005 ). This observation led Friedrich, Vessey, Schuelke, Ruark, and Mumford ( 2009 ) to argue that, in planning, leaders must be able to capitalize on these network structures to bring relevant case-base knowledge to bear on the planning task. Some support for this proposition has been provided in a historiometric study of George C. Marshall, United States Army Chief of Staff during World War Two, conducted by Vessey et al. ( 2014 ). They found that Marshall’s exceptional performance as a planner was to a large extent based on his ability to create and exploit networks, ensuring the availability of requisite case-based knowledge”^​4​

“In teams, networks may be a source of requisite knowledge; however, the model of planning processes also stresses the need to analyze this knowledge and employ it in forecasting and plan formation. Accordingly, a variety of studies indicate that attributes of team interactional processes, for example, openness to alternative perspectives, minimization of interpersonal confl ict, mission defi nition, and clarity of role defi nition (Menon, Bharadwaj, & Howell, 1996 ; West & Sacramento, 2012 ) will contribute to eff ective execution of these planning processes in team settings. Of these variables, however, active, and skilled, participation of team members in the planning activity is likely to prove of special signifi cance with respect to team planning performance (Yukl, 2012 ). The signifi cance of participation, of course, arises from the fact that unless people participate they can- not share knowledge or contribute to the analysis of this knowledge”^​4​

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