How can we get from here to there unless we know what's here and where "there" is? This provides the framework that guides (and evaluates) the specific and practical decisions. It is, for many of us, the most difficult level:

Few men think in universal terms and vast perspectives. Most of them cling to concrete details and proceed only with difficulty from the specific to the general while the reverse course, starting from powerful principles, appears to them hardly possible at all without previous instruction and training .... [They stick to] coastal navigation along clearly discernible shore lines of well-established knowledge, and they do not venture on the high seas of thought and action where the horizons are unlimited. (Zwicky, 1969, p. 3)

The Source

Although it is theoretically possible to start from the abstract, in most plans someone starts with an experiential sense of conditions

or circumstances that warrant change (intervention). These are usually problems to be solved or opportunities to be taken.