Planning (also called forethought) is the process of thinking about and organizing the activities required to achieve a desired goal.

Planning involves the creation and maintenance of a plan. As such, planning is a fundamental property of intelligent behavior. This thought process is essential to the creation and refinement of a plan, or integration of it with other plans; that is, it combines forecasting of developments with the preparation of scenarios of how to react to them.

An important, albeit often ignored aspect of planning, is the relationship it holds with forecasting. Forecasting can be described as predicting what the future will look like, whereas planning predicts what the future should look like. The counterpart to planning is spontaneous order.

Different Types Of Plans..:-

There are many types of planning.

Automated planning and scheduling

Architectural planning

Business plan

Comprehensive planning

Contingency planning

Economic planning

Enterprise architecture planning

Environmental planning

Event planning and production

Family planning

Financial planning

Land use planning

Landscape planning

Life planning

Marketing plan

Network resource planning

Operational planning

Regional planning

Site planning

Spatial planning

Strategic planning

Succession planning

Urban planning

There are three main types of plans that a manager will use in his or her pursuit of company goals, which include operational, tactical and strategic. If you think about these three types of plans as stepping stones, you can see how their relationship to one another aids in the achievement of organizational goals. Operational plans are necessary to attain tactical plans and tactical plans lead to the achievement of strategic plans. Then, in true planning fashion, there are also plans to backup plans that fail. These are known as contingency plans. To better understand how each type of plan is used by managers, let's take a look