Get real when you plan!
Rather than live and plan under the delusion that you know what your situation and prospects are, why not turn to a time-tested method for making sure your strategic plan will be reality based?
That time-tested approach is to do a SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, threats, and opportunities) analysis.
A SWOT analysis:
Gives an overview of the points that add up to potential success (or failure!).
Delivers insights on where your business is.
Helps you spot risky assumptions and uncover dangerous blind spots.
Identifies key items about which priorities for action are called for.
Lays the groundwork for strategic options: opportunities to leverage, problems to solve, threats to mitigate.
Shapes the plan for greater success.
It’s important to populate your SWOT not with conjecture, assumptions, and supposition, but with as much reality and foresight as possible. So where might you find golden nuggets of insight about the future for your organization?
I suggest three avenues:
Ask your stakeholders what they see. Options to get stakeholder input on the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats facing the organization include surveys, focus groups, and interviews.
Key stakeholder groups to consider querying are employees, clients, Board members, suppliers, investors, donors – whomever your organization has or needs meaningful relationships with and potentially have actionable insights about the organization.
A straightforward stakeholder survey might ask:
What do you think are the organization’s greatest weaknesses?
What do you think are the organization’s greatest strengths?
What do you see as important opportunities for the organization to be more effective or efficient; provide better products, services and/or programs; innovate; be in a better financial position, or otherwise be more successful over the next five years?
What do you see as the greatest threats to the organization's financial integrity, products/services/programs, and overall success over the next five years?
What do you think are the most important things for the organizations to begin doing now for greater success in the future?
Envision the organization five years from now. What do you think are the most important things for the organization to achieve by then?
See what’s going on around you. Conduct – to avoid bias, ideally working with an unbiased and qualified outsider – an environmental scan. Discover what may affect the future in which you must succeed by doing a deep dive on the internet, aided by AI, to unearth:
Current trends and forecasts
Drivers of change
Emerging issues, threats, and opportunities
Categories to mine in an environmental scan might include but are hardly limited to:
Competition
Global trends
Economic indicators and forecasts
Legislative and governmental trends
Technological developments
Energy and environmental factors
Social trends
Agricultural and food forecasts
Labor concerns and trends
Transportation forecasts
Political trends and forecasts
Analyze the data collected in the environmental scan to discern and prioritize what’s truly important to factor into your planning and act on.
Identify trends important to your business’s future, both for defensive purposes (e.g., we need to be aware of this and mitigate it) and offensive purposes (e.g. this is a development that we can take advantage of to position ourselves for greater future success).
Analyze your business. Conduct a business analysis, ideally working with an unbiased outside analyst.
A business analysis seeks to provide understanding of the organization’s condition and direction. Use available information to assess finances, customer and revenue trends, product and services, people and providers in and serving the organization, and other key business elements. What are the levels and trends for key indicators? How does the organization benchmark among peers and competitors?
When you have the stakeholder input and findings from the environmental scan and business analysis in hand, then:
Sort it into strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.
Identify – ideally working with your team and advisors – the most important and significant items in each category,
For more clarity, array the prioritized results in a four-square grid, with the source for each insight labeled.
At this point, you are now ready to plan, with strengths to build on; weaknesses to eliminate, mitigate, or avoid; opportunities to explore, evaluate, and pursue; and threats to protect against, insure for, and stay away from.
