Planning vs Design
The previous post presented planning as a computational problem: navigation within a state space. The key insight was that planning presupposes a domain - objects, predicates, actions, goals - and that constructing that domain is a different kind of work from navigating within it. This post explores how the same insight emerged, independently and through quite different pressures, in the context of military operations. The US military, confronting complex environments that resisted traditional planning approaches, developed a distinction between planning and design that resonates with the computational view in ways that illuminate both.
The Planning-Centric Military
Traditional military doctrine is planning-centric. The Military Decision-Making Process (MDMP) is a systematic procedure - receive a mission, analyse the situation, develop courses of action, compare them, select one, produce orders, execute - and it is rigorous, structured, and trainable. It assumes that problems can be analysed, options enumerated, and decisions optimised within a framework that is, for the most part, taken as given. This works well for problems with clear structure; when the objective is defined, the terrain is mapped, the adversary is known, and the resources are available, planning produces effective results. The military has centuries of experience in turning complex operations into executable plans, and planning-centric doctrine encodes that experience with considerable sophistication.
But the US military's engagement in Iraq and Afghanistan from 2003 onward confronted planners with a fundamentally different kind of problem. Counterinsurgency is not a conventional military problem; the adversary is not a uniformed force with identifiable positions and clear objectives; the terrain includes social, political, economic, and cultural dimensions that resist the spatial and temporal abstractions of conventional planning; the objective is not territory but legitimacy, stability, and influence, which are difficult to define and considerably more difficult to measure. Traditional planning struggled in this environment. Commanders would develop plans based on doctrinal templates - clear, hold, build - but the plans did not produce the intended effects; the situation shifted, actions had unintended consequences, and what worked in one location failed in another. The problem appeared to change shape every time planners attempted to grasp it, exhibiting precisely the characteristics that Rittel and Webber (1973) identified in their analysis of "wicked problems": no definitive formulation, no stopping rule, solutions that cannot be judged true or false but only better or worse, and the recognition that every attempted solution is a one-shot operation with irreversible consequences.
The Design Turn
The 2006 Counterinsurgency Field Manual (FM 3-24), developed under General David Petraeus, included a chapter on design that articulated a distinction of considerable theoretical significance:
"While both [design and planning] seek to formulate ways to bring about preferable futures, they are cognitively different. Planning applies established procedures to solve a largely understood problem within an accepted framework. Design inquires into the nature of a problem to conceive a framework for solving that problem".
The passage repays close reading. Planning, in this formulation, applies established procedures - it uses known methods, a playbook, a doctrine - to a problem that is already understood, within a framework that is given and accepted. The challenge is to find a solution, not to define the problem or to question the categories within which solutions are sought. Design, by contrast, inquires into the nature of the problem; it does not assume that the existing framing is correct, and its output is not a solution but a framework - a conceptual structure within which solutions can then be pursued through planning. The manual summarises the distinction as one between problem solving and problem setting.
This distinction has deep roots in design theory, though it arrived in military doctrine through operational necessity rather than through engagement with the design studies literature. Simon (1969) distinguished between well-structured and ill-structured problems, arguing that the former have clear goals, known operators, and definite success criteria while the latter lack these properties. Buchanan (1992) argued that design problems are fundamentally indeterminate - not merely difficult within a given framework but resistant to stable formulation - because design has no fixed subject matter; the designer must determine what the problem is through an act of what Buchanan calls "placement", situating the problem within a framework that gives it tractable form. Schön (1983) drew a related distinction between technical rationality, which applies known techniques to well-defined problems, and reflection-in-action, in which the practitioner engages in a conversation with the situation that may lead to reframing the problem itself. Dorst (2015) develops this further, arguing that expert designers confronted with open, complex, and dynamic problems do not optimise within existing frames but create new ones - a process Dorst calls frame creation, which involves moving beyond the simplifications that underlie conventional problem-solving to arrive at genuinely different ways of understanding the situation.
The Field Manual includes a warning about what happens when this design work is skipped:
"When situations do not conform to established frames of reference - when the hardest part of the problem is figuring out what the problem is - planning alone is inadequate and design becomes essential. In these situations, absent a design process to engage the problem's essential nature, planners default to doctrinal norms; they develop plans based on the familiar rather than an understanding of the real situation".
The phrase "plans based on the familiar rather than an understanding of the real situation" describes a failure mode that extends well beyond the military. Jones (2014) identifies three barriers that inhibit reframing: fixation on established framings, a problem-solving mental model of design that treats the problem as given and seeks solutions within it, and resistance to the uncertainty inherent in genuine inquiry. When organisations face problems that do not fit existing frameworks, the institutional pressure is not to construct new frameworks but to force the unfamiliar problem into familiar categories and to apply the tools that are already available - producing plans that look coherent but do not address the actual situation.
Design in Military Doctrine
Following FM 3-24, the US Army developed several approaches to military design. Army Design Methodology (ADM) is the doctrinal approach, integrated into existing planning processes and including "framing" activities - understanding the environment, defining the problem - before detailed planning begins. Systemic Operational Design (SOD), developed at the Israeli Defence Forces' Operational Theory Research Institute, takes a more radical stance, emphasising holistic understanding of systems, identification of "systemic rivals", and transformation of the logic of the situation rather than defeat of adversaries in conventional terms. Various other efforts have sought to incorporate design thinking into military education and practice, drawing on both commercial design thinking and the distinctive requirements of military decision-making (Wrigley and Mosely, 2021).
These approaches differ in the degree to which they treat design as genuinely distinct from planning. Jackson (2019) observes that both ADM and operational design tend to subordinate the problem-definition aspect of design as a step within a technical rationalist planning process - design is permitted, but only as a preliminary to the real work, which remains planning. This institutional pattern - the planning-centric culture pulling design back into planning's orbit - reflects the difficulty that large organisations have in accepting that some problems require not merely better planning but a categorically different mode of engagement (Zweibelson, 2023).
The State Space Connection
The connection to the computational view developed in the previous post is direct. Planning in the PDDL sense navigates a state space; it finds paths from initial states to goal states within a domain that specifies what states exist, what actions are possible, and what transitions are valid. Design, as the military conceives it, constructs the conceptual framework within which planning can operate; it defines what the problem is, what entities matter, what relationships hold, and what success would look like. The computational vocabulary and the military vocabulary describe the same distinction: navigating a state space is planning; constructing the domain that defines the state space is design. The military learned through hard operational experience what the computational framing makes explicit: one cannot plan until one has a domain, and constructing a domain is a different activity from navigating within one.
Judea Pearl's Ladder of Causation offers a complementary perspective. Pearl and Mackenzie (2018) distinguish between seeing (observing patterns in data), doing (predicting the effects of interventions given a model), and imagining (counterfactual reasoning about what might have been or could be). Planning operates primarily at the second rung - predicting what happens if one takes action X, given a model of the world. Design, as the military conceives it, operates at the third - imagining alternative framings, constructing conceptual spaces that do not yet exist. The capacity to ask "what if the problem were different?" requires the kind of counterfactual imagination that Pearl argues cannot be derived from observational data or intervention alone, which has implications, as I explored in an earlier post, for how we think about the role of AI systems in complex domains: systems operating at Pearl's first two rungs cannot substitute for the third-rung work of imagining genuinely new frameworks.
Beyond the Military
The planning/design distinction is not, of course, exclusively a military concern. It applies wherever problems are complex, contested, or poorly understood; wherever multiple stakeholders hold different framings of what the problem is; wherever the environment is dynamic and unpredictable; wherever success criteria are unclear or value-laden; and wherever existing templates and procedures do not fit the situation as encountered. These conditions describe digital transformation programmes, public service redesign, healthcare system change, urban planning, education reform, and organisational change of most kinds. In all these contexts, there is institutional pressure to plan - funders want timelines, governance requires milestones, stakeholders expect deliverables, and the machinery of project management assumes problems that are plannable. But if the state space has not been constructed - if there is no shared understanding of what states are possible, what actions are valid, or what transitions lead where - then planning produces the appearance of control without the substance.
The Swedish project I described in the first post of the series exemplifies this pattern. The project had a plan, milestones, deliverables, and timelines; it had the form of a well-managed initiative. But the plan assumed a state space that did not exist - patient data in usable form (the data was not available), service catalogues with compatible coding (not established), technical infrastructure for machine learning deployment (not built), and organisational capacity for data science (not developed, and even where developed, there was no data to train models with). The project needed design: inquiry into what problem was actually being solved, what entities actually existed, and what framework could support the intended work. Instead, it received planning applied to an undefined domain - plans, as the Field Manual would put it, based on the familiar rather than an understanding of the real situation. My concept mapping work was, in retrospect, an attempt at design sense-making; I was trying to surface what the problem actually was and to expose the gaps between assumed and actual state spaces, but the project's governance structure did not have room for this kind of work.
The practical implications of the planning/design distinction are significant. Not every problem requires design; some problems are well-structured, the framework exists, and planning is appropriate. But complex, contested, and novel problems require design first, and recognising which type one is facing matters considerably. Design work - inquiry, framing, constructing shared understanding - takes time, looks different from planning, and produces concepts and models rather than tasks and timelines; organisations that value only planning or delivery artefacts will tend to squeeze out design work even when it is most needed. There is a persistent temptation toward premature planning: when pressure to produce plans meets an undefined problem, the result is plans that assume rather than investigate, and the gap between the assumed state space and the actual one widens as the project proceeds. The relationship between design and planning is not a one-time handoff but an ongoing, iterative one; design constructs the framework, planning navigates within it, but as the situation evolves, new design work may be required to update the framework that planning presupposes.
The next post turns to representations - how the artefacts produced by product management and service design embody different assumptions about planning and design, and what the conceptual apparatus developed here reveals about their respective strengths and limitations.
Next: "Representations: Product Management vs Service Design" - how different fields represent their work, and what the differences reveal.
References
Buchanan, R. (1992). Wicked Problems in Design Thinking. Design Issues, 8(2), 5-21.
Dorst, K. (2015). Frame Innovation: Create New Thinking by Design. MIT Press.
Jackson, A.P. (2019). A Brief History of Military Design Thinking. Journal of Military and Strategic Studies, 19(3).
Jackson, A.P. (2024). Military Design Thinking: An Historical and Paradigmatic Survey. In Handbook of Military Sciences. Springer.
Jones, P.H. (2014). Systemic Design Principles for Complex Social Systems. In Metcalf, G.S. (ed.) Social Systems and Design. Springer, 91-128.
Pearl, J. and Mackenzie, D. (2018). The Book of Why: The New Science of Cause and Effect. Basic Books.
Rittel, H. and Webber, M. (1973). Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning. Policy Sciences, 4(2), 155-169.
Schön, D. (1983). The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action. Basic Books.
Simon, H. (1969). The Sciences of the Artificial. MIT Press.
US Army and Marine Corps (2006). FM 3-24: Counterinsurgency. Department of the Army.
Wrigley, C. and Mosely, G. (2021). Defining Military Design Thinking: An Extensive, Critical Literature Review. She Ji: The Journal of Design, Economics, and Innovation, 7(1), 104-143.
Zweibelson, B. (2023). Understanding the Military Design Movement: War, Change and Innovation. Bloomsbury Academic.