It’s time for another strategic plan – yay!

Wait, that wasn’t your reaction?

Is it because you didn’t enjoy the last planning sessions (to put it mildly)? Or, because that last plan didn’t really make a difference? If you are frustrated by the lack of significant results, and dreading the group planning time, you are far from alone.

In my decades as a planning consultant, (with stints as CEO, Executive Director and various officer and board roles) I’ve pinpointed one major cause that undermines strategic planning efforts. It’s starting wrong. The time and effort that goes into a SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats) is not just wasted, it’s a big obstacle to good planning. Far from being tested and true, it’s a process that makes good planning way harder than it needs to be.

What’s more, people hate SWOTs. I’ve had everyone in the room stand up and cheer when I said we weren’t starting with a SWOT and they’ve left at day’s end saying they had fun and felt inspired.

Why is a SWOT the wrong place to start?

Very simple. It roots the planning in today. Or, as Henry Mintzberg, a Canadian and international guru of planning puts it, “in your organization’s current perceptions.”

We plan everything in our lives—our careers, our education, getting to work on time—by working backward from our desired destination EXCEPT when we plan for our organizations. Do you start your vacation planning from today (I’ll take one step towards the beach) or do you have a vision of what you want your vacation to be like? If you did a SWOT without a vision, the result would be information with no context for analysis.

Without a shared concept of what the future should be, planning participants cannot analyze which changes or capacity issues matter. Often, they can’t even determine which are positive and which are negative, so the same issues end up as both opportunities and threats on the flip chart—this is also the same moment people often lose faith in the entire planning process.

Instead, starting by imaging the highest potential of your community, will help you to clearly see what needs to change to create that kind of community. Now your steps can be in the right direction, and you can build on the strengths that matter.

Research shows that it is much more effective to build on strengths, than trying to fix weaknesses. If something is outside your core competencies, think of that as a partnership opportunity rather than an internal weakness you have to stop and fix before you can make progress.

Other great reasons not to SWOT

There are other reasons not to SWOT:

• SWOT saps energy by focusing on weaknesses as much (or more) as strengths, leaving less energy for creative, innovating thinking. It’s exhausting.
• People leave a SWOT ready to cry, believing the cause they are passionate about has almost no chance of succeeding. The list of weaknesses and threats are usually three times longer than the strengths and opportunities. Why would we design an exercise to make our people depressed?
• Because SWOTs mean exposing weaknesses, they are always done internally, without community engagement. (Can’t let anyone see the dirty laundry!)
• SWOT hijacks the potential and possibilities of a project with ALL of the reasons a project won’t work or reasons why it can’t be done. That mobilizes the wrong kind of energy.
• SWOT is an excellent way for a control freak—usually but not always a senior staff officer—to avoid people who want to be part of planning. All the group planning time and energy gets used up. Executive Directors have even asked me to make this happen so they can then pull out their “hip pocket” draft plan and finalize it alone.
• On top of all that, SWOT is a waste of money. In “Strategy Safari”, Mintzberg references a study of companies that used SWOTs “…yet not one subsequently used the output within the later stages of the strategy process.” Can you afford to waste the time of your board and senior staff, and maybe the cost of a consultant, on something that useless?

I have also seen organizations that did use the results and that can be worse. They root their whole plan in fixing internal weaknesses identified in the SWOT. The plan does nothing to move the organization forward, because you can't build strength by aiming at weakness.

Don’t think that because I won’t SWOT, I am not a realist. I strongly believe in understanding the external and internal environments for our organizations. There are genuine barriers to be addressed for every organization, and plans must include practical steps to deal with them.

In summary, when you are considering a planning approach:

1. Start by looking forward to the future of your organization.
2. Build on the strengths that matter.
3. Don’t SWOT! And, if you can’t convince your organization to avoid it entirely (we understand about resistance to change), move it to much later in the process, where it can’t do as much damage. For example, once you have a plan, you can do a “SWOT” to identify areas to strengthen for implementation.

Jane Garthson is President of the Garthson Leadership Centre.