12 Planning and designing

The chapter addresses planning and designing by asking a threefold question: 1) How does talk about plans and designs mobilize specific understandings of the organization, its environment, future and purpose? 2) How do plans and designs have agency in organizations? 3) How do management concepts affect planning and designing? The chapter draws on various illustrative examples – from Babylonian metaphysics to the U.S. Constitution, from Hobbes’s Leviathan to Prussian military doctrine – to suggest that ‘talk’ about planning and designing has more fundamental implications than previously theorized. Prosperous civilization, the chapter argues, requires plannability of the future and purpose to human action. After a brief etymological exploration and preliminary definition, the chapter explores this idea against the CCO-framework’s backdrop and key assumptions: that communication is constitutive of organizations.