Classic · Method
SWOT.
Four boxes most people have filled in at some point, and that fewer have got much out of. That's rarely down to the model, and more often down to the work ending the moment the boxes are full. A completed SWOT is raw material rather than an analysis, and the value appears in the step afterwards, when the boxes are set against each other and you're forced through to a conclusion that somebody is supposed to act on.
The model
Four boxes in two dimensions. Strengths and weaknesses describe the company from the inside and are things you control yourselves. Opportunities and threats sit outside, in the market, in the technology, with the competitors and in regulation, meaning things you can only relate to.
That particular split is easily fudged. Fierce competition belongs among the external conditions, while the weakness lies rather in your not having an answer to it. The difference matters, because only one of the two can be acted on directly.
The model is usually attributed to Albert Humphrey at Stanford Research Institute during the sixties, where it was first called SOFT. It should be said that the attribution rests to a large extent on Humphrey’s own account given long after the fact, and that the original research was never formally published. So the model is more disputed in its origins than it is in its use.
How it’s used
The value lies in the crossings, and that’s the step that most often gets left undone.
Set the strengths against the opportunities and ask which opportunity you’re unusually well equipped to take. That’s where the next investment lies. Set the weaknesses against the threats and ask where an external threat would hit your weakest point. That’s where the next fix lies, and it’s usually urgent without feeling that way.
The requirement for each box is that it has to be concrete enough to be challenged. “Good customer relationships” says nothing anyone can test. “Four of our ten largest customers have been buying from us for over ten years” is a strength, because it can be checked and because it shows a dependency at the same time.
Where it usually gets misused
Most often as an item on a strategy day, mainly to fill an hour with something everyone can join in on. The boxes get filled, the paper gets photographed, and after that it rarely goes any further.
It also loses value when it turns into a list of everything. Four points per box that you can genuinely stand behind give you more than twenty, because a complete list prioritises nothing, and it’s the prioritising that makes it useful.