Strategic Option Cards

Take one strategic issue from your SWOT, force yourself past the options you already favor, describe each on one card and compare them on criteria you agreed before scoring. You finish with a shortlist you can defend and the assumptions that still need testing.

Practitioner craft, not settled research. Ansoff's matrix is an untested but durable heuristic, blue ocean strategy rests mostly on cases with mixed independent evidence, and weighted scoring is a simplified form of multi-criteria decision analysis that is only as honest as its weights. Scales on this page are rules of thumb.

Use it when:

• You have one to three ranked strategic issues from 7.6 SWOT & Strategic Issues and a decision with real alternatives (expand, partner, focus, stay).
• A board, partner or manager expects options to choose between, not a single recommendation.
• A major threat or opportunity has appeared and you are drifting toward the first idea that came up.

Skip it when:

• You have no prioritized issue yet: start with 7.6 SWOT & Strategic Issues.
• You have already chosen and need to write the choice down: go to 7.8 Preferred Strategy Sheet.
• The answer is obvious and only needs a plan: use 8.5 Project Charter.

Two ideas sit behind this page, both practitioner craft rather than settled research. First, generating options is a different skill from judging them, and unaided teams mostly produce variations of what they already do. The lenses widen the search: Ansoff's (1957) product-market matrix is an untested but durable heuristic for growth directions you skipped, and the eliminate-reduce-raise-create prompt comes from blue ocean strategy (Kim & Mauborgne, 2005), whose support is mostly case-based and mixed.

Second, a weighted comparison makes trade-offs explicit, but only if the weights are honest. Keeney (2002) catalogs how value trade-offs go wrong, and weights set after a favorite has formed is the classic failure. So you fix criteria and weights before you generate options. Every card ends with what would have to be true (McGrath & MacMillan, 1995) instead of a sales pitch. And a winner that feels wrong sends its hidden assumption to the risk map, not back to the scoring cells.

Copy the issue from your SWOT and add what limits the answer.

Strong answer: "How do we win the new hotels in the second city before the regional chain does, without breaking delivery to current customers? Decide by 1 March; no new debt; no change of owner." Not: "How do we grow?"

Strategic issue (from 7.6): How do we ?

Decision deadline:

Hard constraints (budget, time, things we will not do):

Illustrative example: the business and all numbers are made up. It continues the laundry in 7.6.

A family-owned laundry in western Sweden serves hotels and care homes in one city. Issue: how to win two new hotels in a second city before a regional chain does, without hurting current customers. Constraint: no new debt.

Weights: fit 5, market 4, return 4, feasibility 3, risk 3, speed 2.

C leads, but the owner is uneasy: will next-day service hold on a route twice as long? That goes to the risk map as an assumption, not into the scores. Shortlist: C, with B as a bridge for the first contracts while the line is installed. A is rejected because it needs a plant the laundry cannot fund; D because waiting hands the hotels to the chain.