SWOT & Strategic Issues

Put your outside view (opportunities, threats) and inside view (strengths, weaknesses) on one page, test each item against evidence, and end with a short list of questions the business must answer, each with an owner.

Weak or contested as research: SWOT is a widely taught practitioner tool with a well-known critique (Hill & Westbrook, 1997), and its origins were only recently traced (Puyt, Lie & Wilderom, 2023). The TOWS matrix (Weihrich, 1982) is a practitioner tool, not tested in research. Box limits and the scoring scale are rules of thumb.

Use it when:

• You have done some outside and inside analysis (for example 7.1 PESTLE Snapshot, 7.2 Industry Structure Page, 7.5 Resources & Capabilities) and need to pull it together.
• You are preparing a strategy day, a business plan or a board discussion and want to agree on what matters most.
• Your last SWOT is a quarter old and the market or your team has changed since.

Skip it when:

• You have no analysis yet: start with 7.1 PESTLE Snapshot and 7.5 Resources & Capabilities, or the grid will be filled with opinions.
• You already know the question and need to choose between options: go straight to 7.7 Strategic Option Cards.

SWOT is one of the most taught tools in strategy and one of the least validated. Even its history was muddled until Puyt, Lie and Wilderom (2023) traced it to a corporate planning exercise whose original grading was later renamed, not to any tested theory. The standing complaint is that it yields long, vague lists that never turn into decisions. This page keeps the grid for the one thing it does well, putting inside and outside evidence side by side, and adds discipline from elsewhere. The TOWS matrix (Weihrich, 1982), also an untested practitioner tool, forces the four boxes into pairs that suggest moves.

Each step answers a known failure. The evidence column in Step 2 rules out entries like "strong brand", because vague items cannot be combined, and it sends weakly supported items to the assumptions page. Step 3 is where the grid becomes moves: if no pairing comes to mind, your items were not specific enough. Step 4 turns moves into ranked "How do we...?" questions with owners, because a SWOT that ends as a neat grid has proved the critique right.

Say what you are analyzing, for how long, and what decision the result will feed.

Strong answer: "Our commercial laundry business in western Sweden, next 24 months, input to the board's decision in March on whether to expand to a second city." Not "the company, in general".

Business or unit:

Time horizon:

Decision this will feed:

Analysis I am drawing on: ☐ Outside view (7.1 PESTLE, 7.2 Five Forces, 7.3 Strategic Group Map) ☐ Inside view (7.4 Value Chain, 7.5 VRIO) ☐ Customer evidence (Module 6) ☐ Financials (Module 5) ☐ Conversations with people close to the work

Illustrative example: the business and all numbers are made up.

A family-owned laundry in western Sweden serves hotels and care homes in one city. The board will decide whether to open in a second city.

T1 goes to the assumptions page first.

TOWS: SO: a two-week trial for the new hotels (S1 + O1). WO: lease a second line before signing them (W1 + O1). ST: two-year renewals with a service guarantee (S2 + T1). WT: decline large tenders until capacity grows (W1 + T1).

Top issue: "How do we win the new hotels before the regional chain does, without breaking delivery to current customers?" Urgency 4, impact 5, owner: operations manager.