How to Conduct a Great SWOT Analysis
Conducting a formal SWOT analysis can sometimes feel intimidating—like an overly formal family meeting, where you and your coworkers sit down together and discuss your weaknesses at length while trying not to get defensive. I know, I’m really selling you on it. But a SWOT analysis is a critical component to your strategic planning efforts. Attempting to create a strategic plan without conducting a SWOT analysis is kind of like planning a trip without knowing what kind of vehicle you’re in—you might still be able to draw a great road map, but it won’t help much if it turns out you’re actually driving a boat.
What is a SWOT Analysis?
As Maria Von Trapp (or Julie Andrews, anyway) once sang, “Let’s start at the very beginning. A very good place to start.” SWOT is an acronym for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. It's a strategic planning tool used to evaluate and navigate how an organization can maximize their operations and resources to thrive in a competitive landscape. This process involves an internal analysis (strengths and weaknesses) and an external analysis (opportunities and threats), and should prompt extensive discussions about how the positive can be leveraged to compensate for and/or mitigate the negative.
Strengths – Everybody’s Favorite Part!
In a formal SWOT analysis, Strengths refer to the internal magic that sets an organization up for success. Consider these questions to help frame your conversations about strengths:
What do you have going for you that other organizations might not?
What are things that might throw other organizations off, but that are you uniquely equipped to handle?
What do you do better than everyone else?
What aspect(s) of your organizational culture are you especially proud of?
Identifying and documenting strengths is critical because they are often inextricable from your organization’s identity and mission. Generally, even without a formal SWOT analysis, your strengths are what allow your organization to keep going. When you stop to identify, document, and logically consider how to best wield their power, you unlock even more potential for your strengths. It’s sort of like using the handle-end of a shovel to dig a hole—it’s great that you have a shovel, and it’s sort of working how you want, but if you examine, discuss, and focus on how you wield it, you could REALLY make some progress.
Weaknesses – At Least You’re Not Willy Wonka
Ah, everyone’s favorite component of the SWOT–Weaknesses. We don’t have to pretend that discussing your organization’s weaknesses is fun, but, if it helps, every organization has them. (And, if you look at a list of the Fortune 500 companies, you can probably guess what some of those problems are. They’re pretty hard to hide). But, point taken, these conversations can be hard, again, here are some questions that can help frame that conversation:
What problems are your team members repeatedly identifying/voicing?
Where are you falling short of performance metrics?
If you could completely change one aspect of your organization, what would it be?
If money wasn’t an object, what solution would you implement/role would you hire for today?
Know what’s worse than a huge, glaring, issue that derails your organization’s day-to-day functionality? Being surprised by that issue. If conducted carefully and thoughtfully, a SWOT analysis makes that much less likely to happen. Just like the poison ivy taking over my herb garden, weaknesses do not get better if left alone, and ignoring them might give you an even bigger problem. So, own this conversation. Put those weaknesses out into the light so that everyone can be on the same page and feel empowered to address them. If it helps diffuse some of the dread, do a 5-minute mini-discussion about the weaknesses of something everyone can laugh about, like how Superman could potentially be arrested for indecent exposure since he’s always changing clothes in public phone booths, or how there’s a very low survival rate for children on a Wonka Chocolate Factory tour.
Opportunities – The Polar Bears are Waiting for You
Opportunities are the pathways for growth and improvement outside of the boundaries of your current situation. To spot opportunities, consider these questions:
Where do you see your field headed in the next 5-10 years?
Are there any gaps in the market that your business could fill?
Are there technological advancements that your business could leverage to improve products, processes, or customer experiences?
Are there potential partnerships, collaborations, or alliances that could open new opportunities?
Opportunities are the strategic "what ifs" that carry the potential to transform your organization's trajectory. They are super exciting to talk about but can be challenging to discuss because the aspirational isn’t always practical. But, still, write them down! Don’t discourage yourself out of dreaming up big goals just because they seem unattainable right now. Your strategic planning will help you identify what’s achievable for your organization in a set timeframe, but if your SWOT only identifies opportunities you can achieve easily right now, you’re going to miss out on building the foundation that will let you pursue those things later. If your research and field experts are telling you that the future of the industry is going to be based at the North Pole, don’t ignore them just because you can’t see how to practically implement that information yet. Keep those findings in mind and in your SWOT analysis. It may only influence decisions in small ways at first, but being aware of and open to Opportunities helps you craft a strategic plan that can take your organization farther (north) than you ever thought possible.
Threats – Anyone Remember Covid?
Even just reading the word “threats” can put you on the defensive—it implies danger! It’s natural to approach this topic with trepidation, but realize by engaging in a thorough SWOT analysis, you’re already preparing to combat these threats in the most pragmatic, proactive way possible. In the SWOT analysis, Threats are external circumstances beyond your control that could negatively impact your organization. Some questions that might help you start this conversation:
Who are your competitors and does their work affect yours?
What economic factors could affect your organization’s financial health?
What emerging social, cultural, or market shifts might cause problems for you?
How might regional/national/global political instability affect your organization?
A discussion about Threats should feel particularly relevant to most of us, since the world recently experienced a pandemic. I’m not sure how many organizations had “Global outbreak of a highly contagious upper-respiratory virus,” on their list of threats before 2020, but I bet a lot more of them do now. Even if you don’t know the precise form they’ll take, being aware of what types of circumstances would pose a threat to your organization is a great place to start. Maybe your business is run remotely, and you aren’t worried about the physical factors that might affect other businesses, but you should be discussing the potential for cybersecurity/data breaches. Remember, the findings of your SWOT will inform your strategic planning efforts, so give Threats the consideration they deserve… or else.
If you’re still feeling reluctant about engaging in a SWOT analysis, here's some good news: we humans actually conduct SWOT analyses all the time just by living regular life. Think about it–when choosing what to eat for lunch, pondering whether to wear the cute heels or comfy flats, or deciding which route to take to get to work, we're constantly weighing the pros and cons, sniffing out opportunities, and dodging potential threats. Pretty much any decision you make is the end-result of a silent, mini-SWOT analysis; we just don’t tend to label it that way. I’m not saying that you need to make your family dress up in business-professional clothing and sit around a conference table to engage in formal SWOT discussions (or, maybe I am, because that sounds weirdly adorable), but I am saying that you probably already do this informally most days, so give yourself some credit. There’s nothing intimidating about ordering lunch (unless you’re ordering from the French restaurant from Key & Peele) or picking out your clothes for the day; these are just decisions we make based on a history of observations and our best hypotheses about how those choices will affect us. Strategic planning is essentially the same process. Collect data, talk to your team, write down shiny new ideas, list things you’re worried about, and, above all, remember: SWOT analyses and strategic planning aren’t tests of you; they’re tools for you. And, hey, if you need help figuring out how to use them, contact your friendly neighborhood higher ed consultants.
