Managing the planning process: Recent trends and challenges

In the recent years the strategic planning process has undergone important changes. It is becoming more and more difficult to predict even medium term performances, this being due to great number of uncertainties and risks: technological and environmental changes, geopolitical factors and political risks ... The management needs to adapt rapidly to changing circumstances. The paper discusses the actual issues in the planning process. It stresses the limitations of the numberically oriented long range planning approach based on the bottom-up and top-down basis. It proposes a new open-ended approach, qualitative in content and flexible in application. The merits of this new approach have been pointed out and also the difficulties have been outlined. The authors contend that the long range plan should raise new and relevant issues on the organisation, on financial objectives, on marketing development, on different kinds of risks ... The need to integrate the human and cultural dimensions of management has also been raised.