During a spontaneous fit of year end cleaning in the office the other day, a tool fell out of the closet and landed on my foot. Luckily, it wasn’t a hammer or worse, an anvil. It was a paper SWOT form for business planning.
I suspect it appeared as a reminder from the universe to encourage me to use this tool more often with clients and also with my own business.
If you’re not familiar with SWOT, don’t confuse it with S.W.A.T., the police team with the special arsenal.
The SWOT I’m referring to is a process for identifying:
- Strengths
- Opportunities
- Weaknesses
- Threats
For use with a group or individually, the SWOT exercise helps all team members recognize what’s good and what is not so good about a business, organization or project.
SWOT was introduced to the business world in the 1960’s and 1970’s in a project at Stanford University by Albert Humphrey. The process focuses on specifying the objective of a business, individual or project and listing the factors that are helping or hurting achievement of the objective.
You’ll like the fact that the SWOT process is fairly simple and is easy to begin.
- Divide a sheet of paper, poster board or white board into quadrants.
- Label the quadrants: Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats.
- Begin to add the items that make up SWOT in a brainstorming fashion. Evaluate and prioritize later.
You can do this as a group project with team members, or individually. According to business consultant Gordon Smith of Buffalo, NY, “The reason this process works is that it takes the thoughts floating around in the brain and gets them on paper for all to see. Most business owners never take the time to put it down in this format.”
In your first SWOT session, fill the quadrants on you worksheet with the items offered by the team. Brainstorming rules apply; no need to be judgmental about the items offered in the first session. Then meet again later the next day or week to review, analyze and then prioritize. The purpose is not to make lists; the goal is to produce strategies and actions to help achieve the objective of your business.
Consider these points:
- You can’t usually fix weaknesses, don’t be distracted. Instead,
- Build on your strengths
- A weak strength doesn’t balance or offset a strong threat
- The desired outcome is strategy and action plans, not a simple list
An individual within a business, a riding instructor for example, can do his or her own personal SWOT session or the entire team can contribute for all departments of a business.
The simplicity and power of this tool put it in the same category as a hammer.
They both are easy to operate and essential for building great things. You will get a good jump on your 2008 business planning with a SWOT session soon.