It is not unusual to find organizations for whom planning represents an onerous tax. Whether it is in regards to resource or task planning, it seems as though many organizations have a common experience of pendulum swings from one extreme to the other. They first largely ignore planning and then, when that becomes too chaotic they swing to the other extreme and attempt to plan things down to the level of 5-minute bathroom breaks. The real question is how to find the appropriate level of taxation, or planning. To do that, let's look at the assumptions behind planning.
Planning is simply an articulation of assumptions.
We assume that a particular task is going to take five days and require two engineers. We assume that another task cannot be started until this one is complete. We assume that yet another task positively must be worked by Bob. If we knew the angle of the throw, the initial position of the dice, the time to release, the distance from the craps table and the heat of the room, we could predict how the dice would land. This is considered a deterministic worldview.