SWOT Analysis

Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats (SWOT). Four boxes, often in a grid. Can be used individually or for teams. I'd guess some of you have sat through a workshop where someone's drawn it on a whiteboard or handed out sheets, excited to discover root causes, gaps and productivity gains. So why does it so often end up as a box-ticking exercise, particularly for teams, rather than something genuinely useful? If it isn't familiar to you, you may have done something similar with 'What's going well, what's going wrong, and what could be better?' That and similar exercises are essentially watered-down versions of the original SWOT that came from the Stanford Research Institute in the 1960s. 

Strengths and Weaknesses look inward. What are we good at, and where do we fall down? Opportunities and Threats look outward, at the world beyond the team or the product. That split matters more than it gets credit for. It's easy to fill the grid with things you already believe about yourself and never actually look deep inside. I'm the same. One done for me looks very different to one done as part of a team. 

I've sat in sessions where the "weaknesses" box got suspiciously thin because nobody wanted to be the one writing something uncomfortable down in front of the boss. No one likes admitting weakness. No one likes openly criticising or questioning colleagues. But that's not a SWOT problem. That's a psychological safety problem.

In my opinion, it earns its keep first when you are honest, and then when it is used as a starting point for conversation rather than just an answer. Whatever is captured is worth nothing unless it is the truth, and until someone asks what we're actually going to do with that information.