Today's unprecedented rate of change requires that decision-makers use effective procedures to deal with the increasing complexity and uncertainty regarding the future results of their decisions. Strategic planning is a middle- and long-range method that fills this need. Its holistic, general-systems orientation is the only way to handle the amount of planning and information required. Decision-makers need information on three factors: the system (or organization) for which planning is being done, its environment, and the system-environment relationship. However, because more information is needed as uncertainty increases, the information must be organized in a model if the decision-maker is to avoid being swamped in data. Strategic planning successfully structures the needed information, using qualitative and quantitative models as well as organizational and political theory. Political theory is included because planning in a democracy is a political activity in which the populace must take part. Modelling in strategic planning can include contextual mapping, relevance trees, and other methods which have been called "futures methodologies." There is, however, no set of futures methodologies separate from those of strategic planning. (RW)