Disappointing Doctrine

With the much-anticipated August 2011 release of Joint Publication, 5-0, Joint Planning, our hopes for greater clarity regarding “design” were immediately dashed. This latest iteration of JP 5-0 confuses rather than simplifies how design should be embraced by planners. As envisioned by political scientists such as Herbert Simon, design offers an approach for addressing ill-structured problems— those that cannot be successfully resolved using traditional linear, analytical approaches like that offered by the methodology of the U.S. military’s Joint Operation Planning Process (JOPP).

Unraveling ill-structured problems is perplexing because by their nature such problems are interactively complex and often have incomplete, contradictory, and changing requirements; attempts to solve them often reveal or create other, even more challenging complications 1. Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber, urban planners at the University of California at Berkeley in the 1970s, wrote about such problems in a 1973 article, “Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning,” observing that there was a whole realm of problems that could not be successfully treated with traditional linear approaches.