Middlegame planning

Hi all,

This thread is fairly similar to the thread "how to form a plan" although I would like to offer a few example positions for people to comment on in order to help me understand this concept more.  Like the OP from that thread I feel fairly confident that I know what I'm doing in the opening.  I have a reasonable knowledge of most of the major variations and opening principles so I generally find that I can reach an equal or better position by the time the middlegame begins.  Now I'm not a complete novice when it comes to planning, in middlegame positions with clear positional themes I feel I can identify these and play accordingly.  However, when I reach pretty much equal and fairly balanced middlegame positions I often find myself staring dumbstruck at the board with no clear idea on how to proceed at which point I just start calculating random variations and then often just playing any move that looks ok.

I don't have many games on this site so I can only use one example from that but I've made up a couple more sample positions that fit the description I just gave.  The first one is from a live game I played a couple of days ago...

I was playing white here with black to move.  Fortunately at this point my opponent made a series of blunders and I got into a favourable endgame however tbh I had no real ideas about how to proceed.  The only real imbalance I could identify was the fact that black had a bishop pair which seemed favourable in the position although this didn't really clarify for me how I should play.

Should I try to avoid these type of positions by playing for more imbalances in the opening?

At this point should I try to unbalance the position more to clarify my strategy?

Here's a couple more positions where I would probably struggle to find a plan appreciate any advice/comments.  Just to clarify I'm interested in ideas for both sides.