SWOT analysis: making one that produces decisions, not adjectives

A SWOT analysis sorts what you know about a business into four boxes: Strengths and Weaknesses, which are internal and mostly within your control, and Opportunities and Threats, which are external and are not. It is the most widely used strategy tool in existence and, in most companies, the least useful — because the standard version ends with sixteen adjectives on a slide and nobody doing anything differently.

The failure is structural rather than intellectual. Four boxes invite listing, listing invites vagueness, and nothing in the format asks the only question that matters: so what? Add a column for the action each point implies and the same exercise becomes a planning session.

What belongs in each quadrant

• Strengths: things you do measurably better than the alternatives your customers have. "Great team" is not a strength; "we ship changes in two days when competitors take three weeks" is.
• Weaknesses: internal facts that cost you work or money. Be specific enough to act on — "one person can do the delivery" rather than "resourcing".
• Opportunities: external changes you could exploit — a competitor withdrawing, a rule change, a shift in what customers ask for.
• Threats: external changes that could hurt you, including the boring ones. Customer concentration and a key supplier's fragility outrank most dramatic scenarios.
• Evidence per point. If nobody can say where a claim comes from, it is an opinion and belongs in a different conversation.
• An action per point, or an explicit decision that none is needed.
• An owner and a date for every action, or the analysis stops at the document.

Keep internal and external strictly separated. The most common error is putting a market condition in Weaknesses — "the market is competitive" is a threat, not a weakness, and mixing them hides the distinction the tool exists to draw: what you can change versus what you must respond to.

Running it in ninety minutes

1. Decide the subject precisely: the company, a product, a market entry, a bid. A SWOT of "the business" in general is where vagueness comes from.
2. Gather the evidence before the meeting — revenue by customer, win and loss reasons, complaint themes, what competitors did this year.
3. Have people write points individually first, then share. Group discussion first converges on whatever the loudest person said.
4. Limit each box to five points. Forcing the choice is what turns a list into a judgement.
5. For each point, ask "so what" and write the action. Points with no answer get deleted rather than kept for completeness.
6. Cross-reference: which strength addresses which threat, which weakness blocks which opportunity. This is where the real insight tends to appear.
7. Assign owners and dates to the actions, and put them wherever your work actually lives.
8. Diary a review in a quarter. A SWOT that is never revisited was a workshop, not an analysis.

SWOT, then TOWS

The step most people skip has its own name. A TOWS analysis takes the same four boxes and pairs them: strengths that could exploit opportunities, strengths that defend against threats, weaknesses that opportunities are blocked by, weaknesses that threats would make dangerous. Those four combinations are where strategies come from — the plain SWOT is only the raw material. It takes twenty extra minutes and it is the difference between a list and a plan.

Ettex Sheets suits the working version: import an existing XLSX with formulas intact, one row per point with columns for quadrant, evidence, action and owner, dropdown validation so the quadrant stays consistent, filters to read all actions at once regardless of which box they came from, conditional formatting to flag points with no action, and cell comments so a disputed claim is argued next to it. Version history means last quarter's analysis is recoverable for comparison — which is the only way to see whether anything changed. The narrative version belongs in Ettex Docs, the resulting actions go in Ettex Board with owners and due dates, and if the analysis is presented, Ettex Slides handles the deck.

Plainly: Ettex has no strategy tooling. There is no SWOT feature, no competitor data, no market intelligence, no automatic analysis of your numbers, and nothing here will suggest what belongs in a quadrant. It is a spreadsheet with structure and a board for what follows. The thinking, and the evidence, are yours. Where the output is a decision to bid or not, it feeds straight into bid writing rather than sitting in a strategy deck.

Why most SWOTs achieve nothing

• Adjectives instead of facts, so no point can be verified or acted on.
• Market conditions filed as weaknesses, collapsing the internal-external distinction.
• Unlimited lists, which avoid the prioritisation that makes it useful.
• No evidence column, so the analysis records opinions with unequal weight behind them.
• No action column — the single change that would fix most SWOTs.
• Done in a group without individual writing first, producing consensus rather than range.
• The TOWS step skipped, leaving four lists that never combine into a strategy.
• Filed after the workshop and never compared against the next one.

A SWOT analysis is worth doing when every point carries evidence and an action. Five per box, internal separated from external, then twenty minutes of TOWS — and the output goes on the board, not into the deck. Where the output is a decision to pursue an opportunity, it belongs next to the business proposal template rather than in a strategy deck.