Planning involves deciding in advance what actions need to be taken to achieve organizational goals. It includes defining goals, developing strategies, and creating formal, long-term plans to coordinate work across an organization. There are different types of planning like informal short-term planning and formal long-term planning. Plans can be single-use, standing, or budgets. While planning brings benefits like reducing decision burden and ensuring consistency, it also has limitations such as inflexibility and becoming outdated over time. The planning process involves analyzing the environment, defining missions and objectives, forecasting assumptions, evaluating alternatives, and implementing and reviewing plans.