Bill Gallagher walks through SWT/SWEAT, a strategic planning tool that identifies your core strengths and weaknesses, then scans broad trends in industry, technology, and culture. You connect those trends to what you do best or worst, creating defensive moves to protect weak spots and opportunistic moves to leverage your strengths during times of change.
We use it every year with our teams that we're coaching and scaling up. We also use it in times of dramatic shift and change. And that is our swt, or sweat tool. Sweat is a more strategic version of something like swot, the SWOT Analysis. The SWOT Analysis SWT focuses more on the trends piece. So what are the core strengths? What are the core weaknesses of the company, the ones that aren't going to change over time? We want to distill that down to the top five or so of things. So we want to distill out those top five or six things that are the core strengths and weaknesses. That's fine, that's similar to before, but these are the unchanging things. Then we want to look exhaustively at trends. What's going on? Or as Wayne Gretzky used to say, skate to where the puck is going is what we're looking for. So where's the puck going? What's happening? What's developing in the world? You're going to start with your own industry, your own technology, your sector, your region where you. Which is common. But now we want to go really, really broadly. Let's go out to culture and arts and music and families and technology and go way outside your normal world. So we're going to notice all the trends really broadly. And now we want to start to connect the dots. What are some defensive strategies between where things are going and our weaknesses? What are some opportunistic strategies between our strengths and where things are going? We're going to have great insights for differentiation, novel business pract, new approaches. When we look at the SWT now, it may take you a little while. We may want to dwell on it, allow it to show up, but this is the way to deal with this. After you've set aside, you've given yourself some breathing room. These are the opportunities for the small and large pivots and the adjustments. And if you'll do this, you will find not just survival, but thriving in the face of change and chaos and drama.
