I.S.W.O.T.

The I.S.W.O.T. now proudly stares down at me from the noticeboard along with my organisational budget, term calendar and shopping list for next weeks refugee lunch. I've been missing the office over the bank holiday especially because on Saturday, something exciting happened. A volunteer came in to help out with the refugee lunch but the kitchen was crammed with people wanting to help so, knowing that he has some background in organisation planning, I invited him to do some project specific planning with me.

We never got on to the planning part because he had noticed that the I.S.W.O.T. and had a look at it. It identifies our website as a weakness. He asked me what I had meant and I showed him the website. He understood. (I will do a before and after post in a few weeks) So instead of planning the youth group we planned the website. I now have a web designer coming to the office once a week to build a new and improved website which will be worth showing the world.

I'm sharing this because I think its a valuable lesson. In community groups there are people from all walks of life who all have something to offer. They can only offer it if they know it is needed. The offer can only be accepted and made use of if we know what is needed.  The I.S.W.O.T. is how people can find out what is needed. Initially I assumed it would mainly be a reference for me. Now I see it has the power to harness peoples' potential and open up new opportunities for volunteers.

Talking strategy is bringing about concrete changes at this community centre. Talking change in a way that inspires, as opposed to isolates, people is a powerful way of beginning the process. Get the tone and pitch right and the whole organisation will be behind you. I've been thinking a lot about that over the last few days. My next post will share a few of my conclusions. Hopefully it won't all be hot air...

Presenting... The I.S.W.O.T. (Interconnected S.W.O.T. Analysis)

It dawned on me after I finished the last post that the logistics of getting the SWOT analysis onto the blog might be problematic. I can now add document conversion to my list of IT skills (though the quality leaves much to be desired). I hope the image gives a sense of what this analysis became. There were several other rows of course, but each organisation and project will be different so an example is enough J

You can see that the matrix- demonstrating the SWOT analysis- has been transferred to the columns and the strings- demonstrating interconnectedness- have been transferred to the rows. Microsoft Office 2007 has all sorts of ‘smart art’ graphics designed to help visualise this kind of thing. None of them, I mean it, none of them came close to the clarity this table gives. You read down to see our strengths, weaknesses etc and read across to see the connections between them.

The board loved it. They could see clearly what the problems were and where obvious solutions could be found. Which leads us to the real point and value of this way of doing S.W.O.T analysis: we can easily identify the problems we have which do not have simple solutions. These are, therefore, the areas on which we need to focus our attention.

This brings me to the end of my summary of this week’s strategic planning. I’m writing this on a Friday which is why all these posts are appearing in the same evening. In future, I hope there will be more of an ongoing update to this blog. Happy planning!

SWOT the Centre

Anyone who has ever been on a strategic planning course will be familiar with an acronym that gets plastered up on power point presentations as though it’s the holy grail of project planning: S.W.O.T.

For anyone who hasn’t been on such a course, this stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats. It is a simple matrix designed to get people thinking about the important aspects of their projects and organisations.

I got a few guys from the centre together on Monday morning and we did an analysis of our organisation. I think it was important not to do it alone but to include people who use our facilities. I keep my ear to the ground when it comes to listening to the views of centre users but there is nothing better than direct input. I cleared a noticeboard in the office, got everyone a coffee and we all sat around sticking post-it notes to the board as we came up with different attributes of the centre.

When we completed this I thought it looked great. I was staring at it on my notice board when the I.T. Tutor came in:

Joe: “Look at this, isn’t it great!”

Paul: “errrrrr”

Joe: “It’s a SWOT Analysis. It tells us our strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats.”

Paul: “Ah cool… But what’s it for?”

Joe: “errrrrr… I guess it helps us know where we are as an organisation… except… its actually separating everything up. There’s no connections”

Paul: (staring at it for a moment) “…you need some string”

Paul was right. I looked again and saw the fundamental problem with a basic S.W.O.T. analysis: It doesn’t show connections. It actually boxes our strengths away from our problems. How can we know how to take advantage of opportunities or rectify weaknesses if we don’t connect them together?

So armed with a ball of string and a load of pins I got to work connecting the different attributes together: e.g. pay as you go funding connected with low attendance at classes. I quickly realised I would end up with way too many connections so clustered the attributes into related groups: volunteers, projects etc

Eventually my S.W.O.T matrix became a web of connections joining key ideas together (see the picture). 

I had to give a report on this at a board meeting on Tuesday. Obviously I couldn't take the notice board with me so I needed to come up with a way of demonstrating both the S.W.O.T and, crucially, the connections. And this had to be in a way that everybody on the board could relate to and understand.

The next post will show how :) ...

The First Mistake of Strategic Planning

Welcome to my blog. The aim of this page is to help small community organisations to develop strategic planning techniques. I work in a community centre and have spent the last year thinking about strategic planning. 


This, I confess, was my first and biggest mistake so far! Thinking is not an achievement. Thinking is, to put in bluntly, not doing. The aim of this blog is to help others make the step that I have finally made, from thinking about planning, to actually planning. If you are involved in the running of a community group, a religious group or a small charity and want to see some real change happen at an organisational level in your organisation, I hope that you will find something of value in my posts. I can’t promise results because I don’t know that my ideas are going to work. I’m at the beginning, just like you. So let’s get this going…