Test your strength

Secret Weapon #019

09 November 2025

When you’re doing strategy and planning work – whether it’s evaluating a new initiative, choosing between options, or building a roadmap – it’s much easier to make good decisions if you’re sure about the ground you’re standing on.

This means knowing about yourself (whether it’s you personally, your team or the wider organisation or company) and knowing about the world around you.

A simple framework for exploring this space is to work systematically through your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats.

The first two of these are internal:

• Strengths: what are you good or powerful at?
• Weaknesses: what gaps do you have / what’s holding you back?

And the second two are external:

• Opportunities: what’s out there that you could capture / capitalise on?
• Threats: what might challenge or undermine your position?

Once you’ve mapped these out, step back and consider the implications for your strategy. Match opportunities you want to pursue to your strengths. Shore up weaknesses before threats materialise. Take smart risks by calibrating them against areas where you are strong but the threats facing you are substantial (or where your position is weak, but the potential opportunity is large).

The power of this framework is in forcing you to reflect and be honest about the situation you find yourself in. Too often people jump straight to solutions without a frank assessment of their own capabilities or the environment around them; conducting a thorough SWOT analysis is a good way to ground your decision making first.

And like most frameworks for strategy and analysis, this one works best when you involve other people. Different perspectives will surface things you’d miss on your own, and the shared understanding you build together makes subsequent decisions much easier to align on.