This is an impactful business management tool to prioritize maturity development and improve market position with urgency. In the context of seizing opportunities, and converting challenges, you can quickly identify the strengths to enhance, and weaknesses to address first. It shouldn't be isolated to strategic planning but used to kickstart a team's progress on a project, improve a market position of a product, and even advance customer and vendor management.
SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) has been a part of business strategic planning for nearly half a century. It is a great way to gain an overall understanding of the business environment, position and internal health of the organization. It is usually completed with a team of stakeholders during strategic planning, along with other views like PESTEL, and Ansoff Matrix. Its compartmentalized approach, with separate internal/external, good/bad view fits well with group dialogue, brainstorming, post-ups/splats, etc. facilitating idea sharing and learning. Its final product gives a great "snapshot" of the business' competitive position. But so what? What then? This is the biggest critique of SWOT, it lacks relevance.
While attending an executive leadership program at Cranfield University, UK through Morgan Advanced Materials, I learned an enhancement to SWOT, called the 9-box SWOT. (This is different than the professional development tool leveraged in HR). By adding 5 boxes to the SWOT- you transform this analysis to targeted actions with immediate impact because it communicates relevancy and urgency. With this change in perspective, the tool goes from a simple (though effective) analysis to an impactful action list. Whenever you can use approaches that generate actions, you impact mental models and set expectation for action, not just analysis. It seems simple, but you'd be surprised how often teams just talk or analyze with no action.
Here are some tips for using a 9-Box SWOT for relevant action:
When can you use a 9-Box SWOT? When you need to develop actions that directly impact your internal and external position. Use it to improve a company, customer or vendor relationship, project, product market position, team, initiative, or process. The top-far-left square will contain your target, and the goal. Adding key performance indicators (KPI) to the target description will improve the completeness of your analysis. If your strengths (and capabilities) don't support your KPIs, then your weaknesses should reflect this. If your opportunities won't facilitate realization, then your threats should describe your limitations.
What are the other four squares that make up a 9-Box SWOT? These squares will contain actions that would enhance the positive aspects, and limit or remove negative risk and threats:
Strengths and Opportunities. What actions would enhance or leverage a strength to seize and even enhance opportunities? if you have a strong engineering group (strength), and a favorable product-line market position due to a competitor shortfall (opportunity), target actions of engineering efforts to further increase market share and penetration, like targeted training programs specific to the product line for new hires, and further production improvements for improving quality with audits to verify process capability.
Strengths and Threats. What actions would convert threats and challenges into opportunities? if you have volatile make-to-order, MTO demand (threat), and strong relationships with customers (strength), implement raw material or WIP buffers for quicker response to surges, sharing carrying costs with customers, or figure out other ways to leverage the relationship to minimize the impact of the volatility.
Weaknesses and Opportunities. What actions would overcome weaknesses and close gaps that might constrain seizing opportunities? If you have a high churn rate for a key position (weakness), and a potential expansion in the market (opportunity), set actions to bridge the gap while a permanent candidate is placed, and resolve the root cause of the turnover. Is the position overloaded? Too specialized? Get a team together to enhance the position's appeal.
Weaknesses and Threats. What actions would shore-up weaknesses and limit vulnerabilities to negative risk? If your market share is suffering (threat) due to quality issues (weakness), you must get actions together ASAP to stabilize your quality and give attention to customer's experiencing issues.
The 9-Box SWOT is so effective because its varied perspectives reveal systems and relationships that yield an easily prioritized, action-oriented plan, targeted to survival and thriving. Some actions are going to be so important, you would have developed them anyway, but you will develop more complete actions and people will better understand the importance of them. When employees understand "the why", they will act accordingly.
It should be noted the effectiveness of any tool is inherently linked to the user's ability to wield it. If the 9-Box SWOT is not done with the right inquiry system and boundary judgments, critical details could be omitted, and the tool become significantly less useful. Similarly, the relevancy and completeness is directly related to the inclusion of stakeholders that can impact its accuracy.
If you would like some help in understanding this tool, feel free to reach out to me on LinkedIn or on purposeleapsurge.com. At PLS Management Consulting we can help you increase employee engagement and systems thinking for step-ahead outcomes through our Meeting Arena Training located here, the PLS Framework located here, through Systems Thinking in Project Management training located here, and Systems Thinking in Operations Management training located here.
Lori G. Fisher, PMP
PLS Management Consulting
Purpose | Leap | Surge
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