It is expected to be a formal consideration of an organization's future course and deals with some or all of the following key questions:

In business strategic planning, the third question is better phrased as "How can we beat or avoid competition?" (Bradford and Duncan).

A strategic plan provides the foundation and frame work for a business plan and in the case of new enterprises it serve as a framework for decisions or for securing support/approval from banks, Private equity players, angel investors and financial institutions. This in turn provides a basis for more detailed annual and sectoral plans.

Environment Analysis or scanning is the first stage of any serious long-range planning. However, the quality of this analysis is especially important in the context of scenario planning and includes tools like SWOT, PEST analysis, Competitive analysis based on various well trusted models, competitive strategy analysis etc.

Scenario planning or scenario thinking is a strategic planning method that some organizations use to make flexible long term plans. It is in large part an adaptation and generalization of classic methods used by military intelligence.

Scenario planning includes systems thinking elements that are difficult to formalize, such as subjective interpretations of facts, shifts in values, new regulations or inventions. Scenarios usually include plausible, but unexpectedly important situations and problems that exist in and some measure today and are likely to impact the organization in the coming years.