Plan

Plans prescribe proposed methods of moving towards or achieving one or more objectives[?] or goals.

Often structured, plans can occur in projects, diplomacy, careers, economic development, military campaigns or in the conduct of some business.

The discipline of planning has occupied great minds and theoreticians. Concepts such as top-down planning[?] (as opposed to bottom-up planning) reveal similiarities with the systems thinking behind the Top-Down Model.

Economic planning became an important discipline in the Soviet Union and in Japan -- in the West the word "planner" may rather evoke images of town planning.

In military usage, the grand structured pre-set plans of World War I became the more flexible and less pretentious limited-objective operations of World War II and later.

Notable plans include:

• The Schlieffen Plan
• The Five-Year Plan system in the former Soviet Union
• The Marshall Plan
• The much-heralded U.S. plan to invade Iraq