Like PEST, SWOT is a much-used but often misunderstood tool. Perhaps like me you have used this as a simple brainstorm to complete four boxes on a flipchart, paused briefly (wondering exactly what to do next) and then moved on to the important business of crafting a strategy.
Happily someone showed me a few years ago how to use it to its full extent. In summary, there are five things to watch out for:
1. The Strengths and Weaknesses (S & W) are all about your organisation and what it can and can’t do well in the view of your customers. It’s not enough to reflect on this yourselves, you need to have some hard evidence from those you are trying to serve. They really know what you are good and not-so-good at.
2. The Opportunities and Threats (O & T) are all about changes taking place outside your organisation that you cannot control. These are the things that will have come out of your external environment analysis. Opps and Threats are not the place to capture all those ‘bright ideas’ you might have, like ‘we could develop a partnership with XYZ’. Those bright ideas come later when you set your strategy.
3. You need to somehow rank all these Opps and Threats. I use certainty / impact: how certain are we that the O or T will happen, and how big is the impact on us if it does? You can use a numbered scale say 1-3 to do this. You then focus on the high certainty / high impact O and T for the next step.
4. The real value of SWOT – and this is the bit I never used to do – comes when you look at the the priority O & T in the context of your S & W. So for example, take your first Opportunity. Do your S help you take advantage of it? Do your W mean that it’s an Opportunity lost? Work through them all and then do the same with your Threats. Do your S help you overcome or avoid them? Or do you have W that compound them?
4. You now have a series of combinations of S/O W/O S/T and W/T that will throw up a (hopefully limited) number of issues. For example ‘XYZ organisation is looking for a partner in technology and we’re strong in that area’. Or ‘Although there are grants available for employment work we’re really better at education’. Or ‘legacies are going down and we’ve never invested in other forms of fundraising’.
5. If you’re still with me after all that…you now have the key issues that your strategy needs to tackle. How you set your objectives and strategy is a whole ‘nother topic which I’ll leave others to comment on!
Oh – and a ‘proper’ SWOT like this isn’t a 30 minute brainstorm in a day’s activities – it is the day’s activity.
Apologies if this is teaching you to suck eggs; hopefully it is of some help to some people.
Nicholas
Like PEST, SWOT is a much-used but often misunderstood tool. Perhaps like me you have used this as a simple brainstorm to complete four boxes on a flipchart, paused briefly (wondering exactly what to do next) and then moved on to the important business of crafting a strategy.
Happily someone showed me a few years ago how to use it to its full extent. In summary, there are five things to watch out for:
1. The Strengths and Weaknesses (S & W) are all about your organisation and what it can and can’t do well in the view of your customers. It’s not enough to reflect on this yourselves, you need to have some hard evidence from those you are trying to serve. They really know what you are good and not-so-good at.
2. The Opportunities and Threats (O & T) are all about changes taking place outside your organisation that you cannot control. These are the things that will have come out of your external environment analysis. Opps and Threats are not the place to capture all those ‘bright ideas’ you might have, like ‘we could develop a partnership with XYZ’. Those bright ideas come later when you set your strategy.
3. You need to somehow rank all these Opps and Threats. I use certainty / impact: how certain are we that the O or T will happen, and how big is the impact on us if it does? You can use a numbered scale say 1-3 to do this. You then focus on the high certainty / high impact O and T for the next step.
4. The real value of SWOT – and this is the bit I never used to do – comes when you look at the the priority O & T in the context of your S & W. So for example, take your first Opportunity. Do your S help you take advantage of it? Do your W mean that it’s an Opportunity lost? Work through them all and then do the same with your Threats. Do your S help you overcome or avoid them? Or do you have W that compound them?
4. You now have a series of combinations of S/O W/O S/T and W/T that will throw up a (hopefully limited) number of issues. For example ‘XYZ organisation is looking for a partner in technology and we’re strong in that area’. Or ‘Although there are grants available for employment work we’re really better at education’. Or ‘legacies are going down and we’ve never invested in other forms of fundraising’.
5. If you’re still with me after all that…you now have the key issues that your strategy needs to tackle. How you set your objectives and strategy is a whole ‘nother topic which I’ll leave others to comment on!
Oh – and a ‘proper’ SWOT like this isn’t a 30 minute brainstorm in a day’s activities – it is the day’s activity.
Apologies if this is teaching you to suck eggs; hopefully it is of some help to some people.
Nicholas
Just spotted that there are of course six steps in the process I’ve described here – deliberate mistake…