Pitfalls in planning: contrasting perspectives on mental health and corporate planning.

Planning is a management activity that has been linked to high quality services, organizational growth, and in austere times, to organizational survival. The present study was undertaken to identify the critical barriers that inhibit or derail effective planning. It was predicted that human service and corporate managers would generally agree about the most and least important planning pitfalls in their systems. Discrepancies would be related to differences in the structural characteristics of organizations in the two sectors. Rankings made by 57 senior mental health administrators of the most and least important pitfalls in planning were contrasted with those of 159 corporate executives. Substantial agreement between the two groups of executives was found.