Developing a SWOT Mindset

A SWOT analysis is a way to assess internal/external factors when making strategic decisions about business directions. In brief, this is a way to explicitly state the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats for a company to determine the best way to move forward. More here.

The takeaway: this mindset can be applied to literally everything.

Here's a recent example: I recently held our company's first (ever!) project kick-off meeting.

I put oodles of thought into the project scope, timeline, stage-gating, background, and responsibilities... and the meeting was a disaster. Everyone had ideas that, to me, didn't fit into my idea of how the project should run. I couldn't just copy the "agile project management" structure I had learned and paste it onto our company. A SWOT analysis of our team reveals why:

• Our team's strength is our enthusiasm for solving problems and having expertise in a variety of fields.

• Our team's weakness is a lack of industry experience - 75% of us have never held a full-time industry position before joining.

• Our team has an opportunity to completely redesign the way that we approach projects.

• Our main threat is projects with a high ideas-to-progress ratio - spending too long in the planning phase instead of making meaningful progress.

Now it was clear that the goal for this first (formalized) project in our company wasn't the same as the project goal - it was to develop a project management structure that amplified our strengths (that everyone has ideas!) while supplementing our weakness. Now we're exploring a radically different kind of project management structure that integrates structured brainstorming and dynamic timelines to focus our ideas and push the project forward.

Even if you're not an executive or business strategist, the SWOT mindset can be mapped onto an infinite number of questions, like

• How do we determine relative priority between two projects?

• Should we develop a process ourselves, or outsource it?

• Is this design change going to benefit our company in the long term?