SWOT The Scenario

I want to share with you a tool I've been using with all of my clients around scenario planning.

And in this case, it's about planning for potentially a pending recession. Or maybe we're already in a recession. And what you want to do for a scenario is you want to SWOT the scenario.

Now most of you might know what I mean by SWOT, a SWOT analysis, Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats.

Now, normally, when you think of a SWOT you think about SWOT-ing a business, or a division or a product line, what does it mean to SWOT a scenario?

Well, using the recession, as an example, what you want to do is say, what are the strengths related to our preparedness? For a recession?

What weaknesses do we have around our preparedness?

What opportunities might we have, within a recession.

I have a client that happens to be flush with cash, they have an opportunity to go out and, you know, potentially gobble up a whole bunch of their competitors that aren't so flush with cash. And once you come out of the recession, they're going to be in an amazing position in, you, for their clients and in relation to their competitors.

So strengths related to your preparedness for recession, weaknesses, opportunities, and what are those threats that have to do with your preparedness for a recession?

What you want to do is get your team together, and have everybody come up with what are two or three strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats, and talk about those.

Now for some of those, you're going to look at it and say, All right, that's a strength we have. That's good to know, no real action there. For others, you may look and say there's a strength, there's an action, we can take a specific action, we can take an innovative action we can take to leverage that strength.

Same goes for opportunity for weaknesses, opportunities and threats. So what's a good to know, what's an action, from there, you will come out with some number of actions which you then want to prioritize. Those are the actions you take for that scenario.

Very powerful, in and of itself.

Now, let me take it one step further. And this happens to be something I learned from Crystal Washington, who's a great speaker and futurist. I learned it from her in the National Speakers Association, influence conference. And it's the idea that we could SWOT a scenario.

But how certain are we that that scenario is going to occur?

We have some level of confidence.

What if we looked at the two or three most likely scenarios, inflation continues, but there's no recession, there is a moderate recession, there is a great recession, or maybe the world closes down due to COVID, again, or monkey pox or whatever it is.

SWOT two or three different, somewhat likely scenarios. Do that same exercise for each one, come up with the top three to five innovative actions. And then here's the interesting part.

Which actions are the same, regardless of which scenario occurs, there's going to be some overlap. Those actions that are similar across different scenarios, those are the ones you want to take action on first, because regardless of where things go.

You're going to be able to take powerful, innovative action.

So great tool for scenario planning, SWOT the scenario plan, if you haven't done it for recession, continued inflation, monkey pox, whatever the scenarios are for you.

SWOT that scenario right now.