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Situation Analysis: Get consensus on the key (helping and hurting) external environmental trends that may have significant impact on the company’s future performance:

• Internal / External Assessment: Determine major areas of strengths to leverage, weaknesses to bolster, opportunities to take advantage of, and threats to neutralize.
• General Environment: Determine major technology, economy, society, regulatory, and political trends that can and most likely will affect your company in both the short and long term.
• Industry Environment: Clearly articulate your markets, their needs, industry trends, competition in defined markets, barriers to entry, assumptions you’ve made in the past and need to make in the future, and substitute products / services.
• Summary of Strategic issues: Come to a consensus as to what the critical top-level strategic issues are.

Financial Assessment: Define and communicate what the "no change" expectations are and then define and compare against the expected growth. Agree on the baseline financial forecast, the results expected in the future if no strategic or structural changes are made in the business, and – at a very high level – agree on the desired future financial picture. Identify any critical financial issues that need to be addressed.  

Strategic Alternatives: Identify the top most-probable strategic alternatives / initiatives, their pluses and minuses given the company’s strengths & weaknesses, probable financial and market situation / forecasts and the steps that must be taken to evaluate them, and decide which to pursue.

Strategic Priority Issues: Identify the top strategic priority issues that must be addressed by the company. These are typically those that:

• Have a long term and positive financial impact
• Address a fleeting market window
• Are critical to any ‘stop the bleeding’ issues

These come from the SWOT assessment, and generally meet one or more of these criteria:

• Deals with identified trends
• Addresses a fleeting window of opportunity
• Are critical to fix or correct any key structural weaknesses
• Things you can do internally to affect change

Key Results Areas / Critical Success Factors: Define the areas the high criticality and measures that the organization will use to establish objectives and to measure strategic and financial success.

Specific 3 to 5 year objectives: Based on the strategic alternatives & direction defined earlier in the session, determine the core three to five objectives which should be met over the next three to five years.