Facilitate a SWOT Session
SWOT = Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats. Many businesses and organizations hold SWOT sessions while planning or setting goals, and find them to be beneficial in moving forward. Such sessions will help you in identifying the ways in which all four areas affect your work. In turn, this knowledge will help you plan for ongoing success. If you've never held a SWOT session before, follow the simple steps below, and you will be well on your way to successful planning.
Steps
Preparing for the Session
- Announce the session ahead of time. It is important that your employees or colleagues know to expect such a meeting in the near future. This will get their minds working on the topic and will provide for a much more productive session.
- Perhaps issue some background materials on what SWOT is all about, along with some suggestions for individual preparation. It also helps to make it clear what is hoped for in terms of individual participation.
- Prepare the SWOT chart. Use a large flip-chart to make a chart with four squares - like a tic-tac-toe chart, but 2 x 2 instead of 3 x 3.
- Label the top left square “Strengths”
- Label the top right square “Weaknesses”
- Label the bottom left square “Opportunities"
- Label the bottom right square “Threats”.
- Add any further labeling. Be sure to make it clear that the top two squares (Strengths, Weaknesses) focus in the “Internal” aspects of your organization or company. The bottom two squares focus on “External” elements; things that are not directly under your control.
- Prepare individual materials. This step is completely optional but it can be helpful to guide the process, especially for beginners. You can choose to create individual SWOT charts for employees to use in the brainstorming session explained below, or you can simply have them bring their own paper and write it out themselves.
Holding the Meeting
- Begin the meeting. Introduce the session you are about to begin and be sure to explain how a SWOT session works, why it is important, and what you will be using the output for. This step is especially important if your employees are unfamiliar with SWOT analyses.
- Ask members of the team to relate back to you what their personal understanding of SWOT is. This will help you to identify any misunderstandings and to see how well team members have grasped the purpose of this exercise.
- Brainstorm. Beginning with internal factors, have employees think of any and all strengths and weaknesses either individually or in groups. Next, move to external factors and have them do the same things for opportunities and threats.
- It can help to divide large teams into small groups of 2-4 persons for more effective brainstorming outcomes. Then bring the group together to discuss as a whole and to share the different ideas.
- Consolidate the ideas. On your large chart, start with one area and have employees call out the ideas they came up with. When one area has been exhausted, move on to the next until all four have been completed.
- Review. Beginning with internal strengths and moving all the way through external threats, review what you have come up with. If necessary, add new ideas that are generated. From there, decide where your major focus areas should be based on the situation you have lined out on the chart - this may require an additional brainstorming session.
- Record. It is extremely important that you record all of the output of the meeting to use in your subsequent planning meetings, and to refer back to as a sort of guide to see how far you have come.
Tips
- If need be, you can focus on only one aspect of the company or organization rather than looking at the entire thing as a whole. This can be incredibly beneficial for individual teams or departments within a company.
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