The SWOT Analysis

Strengths Weaknesses Opportunities and Threats or SWOT analysis may be one of the oldest techniques in the book, but it still brings results. Meeting Faciltators International has facilitated hundreds of these sessions and we find that by making some changes to how the analysis is created, we can make this old standby even better.

Strengths and Weaknesses

We see three problems when we look at the lists of strengths and weaknesses that our clients show us from previous sessions. The first is that the lists are rarely ranked in any kind of priority sequence. The second is that the wording is usually so broad that it is hard to know just exactly what the strength is. (e.g. Our People, I am sure you have great people but what is the strength? Is it there ability to come up with innovative solutions to problems, is it there ability to develop and maintain strong relationships with customers, and partners, or ...?) And the third problem is that there is no linkage from these lists back to anything else, the lists were brainstormed by some group and exist in a vacuum.

By changing the basic approach all three problems can be eliminated. We like to use an approach based on a technique called Appreciative Inquiry. To identify the strengths of the organization we have everyone at the planning session take turns relating short stories describing a recent success or accomplishment of the organization. Once each story has been told the entire group then discusses the story to identify the key contributing factors to the success or accomplishment (i.e. strengths) As the facilitator we push the group to be specific as they describe the key differences that made the difference. Once all of the stories have been told we then prepare a combined list of strengths and priority rank this list. (We do this with a multivote. In a multivote each person would be asked to pick the top five strengths from a list of twenty. By simply counting up the number of top five votes each strength receives we can rank the list.) Having addressed accomplishments and strengths we then do the same for disappointments and weaknesses.

At the end of this process we have a well defined, priority ranked list of specific strengths and weaknesses that can be illustrated by the recent accomplishments and disappointments of the organization.

Opportunities

Identifying opportunities can be more straightforward. People spend a lot of time thinking about this and the first thing we want to do is capture all of that thinking. A straightforward brainstorming approach works well here. If we have done an Environmental Scan we will extend the brainstorming to include ways to benefit from the major Political, Economic, Social, Technological and Compeititive trends identified. We will also go back to the Strengths and Weaknesses just identified to see how we can leverage the strengths and mitigate the weaknesses. If we have done a "Win Loss" analysis we will work with this as well build the lessons learned into the opportunities list. We will also do the same if we have done a customer segmentation to identify your most attractive and least attractive customers. And finally we will go back to the vision of success if we have completed one for futher inspiration as to future opportunities. Having completed all of this we will have far more opportunities than we can pursue so we go into a priority ranking exercise. We use a variety of tools here depending in part on what else has already been accomplished with respect to strategy or to higher level goals and objectives.

Threats

Threats are another area where we have revised our approach significantly. We use two techniques here, one to identify external threats and one to identify internal threats. The external threats analysis is based on "war games" where we have members of the planning team develop strategies for competitors that we have selected. The internal threats analysis is based on a "pre-mortem" where people are told that the organization failed to accomplish all of its goals and that they are to use their knowledge of the organization and the environment to explain what went wrong and why.

For more details on this and our entire approach to strategic planning why not contact us?