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 :) ...