I don't think agile methods necessarily rule out planning. It's possible to combine Waterfall and Agile within the same project, so long as you are clear about

I don't think agile methods necessarily rule out planning. It's possible to combine Waterfall and Agile within the same project, so long as you are clear about what you are trying to achieve. When I embark on a new project, it's routine for me to spend a couple of weeks with the customer sounding out their requirements and helping them form an initial vision of what they want the software to do. (Big companies call this "business analysis".) Once I'm reasonably certain what sort of thing the customer wants, I start work on the first "sprint". This first sprint is often quite a bit longer than subsequent sprints, and incorporates the holistic design phase you mention. It's not uncommon for me to spend a month designing and working on this first iteration. The goal of this first iteration is to capture the essence of the vision without implementing the details. Only once the customer has viewed the results do I reduce the time for each sprint to a week. (I believe two weeks is more common, but this period suits me and seems to fit with what my customers want too.) A dozen or so iterations/sprints later, and I tend to be done. At least for a while, anyway... inevitably a customer will decide they want another big feature and I start over with the business analysis and the long first iteration followed by shorter incremental steps.