A Typology of Planning Problems

Abstract

Colleges and universities are profoundly affected by the vicissitudes of the external environment, including rapidly shifting levels of public support, enrollment fluctuations, quixotic revisions in federal regulations, and precipitous changes in sponsored research priorities. Inside institutions of higher education, decisionmaking processes have been described as organized anarchy [8] and have been characterized by ill-defined goals and preferences, floating coalitions taking unpredictable collective action, and a poorly understood technology that cannot reliably achieve desired ends. The number of problems facing those responsible for institutional redesign is staggering. In this article, we develop a descriptive typology of the problems that may be encountered during planning. The typology identifies areas of potential difficulty that face both procedural planners, concerned with the processes through which problem solving will be addressed, and substantive planners, whose plans result in a new performance program [36]. The typology takes the form of a matrix in which four planning phases are represented as columns and five institutional constructs appear as rows. The matrix cells represent categories of activity that require choices by planners, choices that, if inappropriate, will likely result in problems [13]. This typology should be useful for several reasons. First, the typology helps to reduce many seemingly disparate issues and concerns into a relatively small number of categories. Second, a typology encourages richer descriptions and more exact distinctions between the different