Lean Marketers: SOAR vs. SWOT

How many resources do you have? Should you be using them on your weaknesses or your strength? In a recent post Looking for a Game Changer, Start Underperforming!, I discussed not looking for areas of deficiencies and improvement but to expand on the areas we do well in. You cannot be everything to everyone and so you have to limit your resources. So why not use them on what you do well?

In the typical SWOT Analysis (SWOT analysis examines the Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats of different strategies), I believe most of us have a tendency to focus on our weaknesses and threats more than our strengths. Just doing the math SWOT/WT, we spend 50% of out time doing just that.

In the Appreciative Inquiry field, there has been a movement to use a SOAR (Strengths, Opportunities, Aspirations, Results) analysis in lieu of SWOT. SOAR is a great method to use for expanding on the positive areas of an organization. It normally is much easier to gain buy-in from stakeholders with this approach versus others.

In the book The Thin Book of SOAR; Building Strengths-Based Strategy, the authors state:

People tend to look for problems and focus on weaknesses and threats before searching for possibilities. For example, one participant of a SWOT process described this tendency as follows: “Having used SWOT analysis for the previous fifteen years, I had experienced that it could be draining as people often got stuck in the weaknesses and threats conversations. The analysis became a descending spiral of energy.” Or, as another described his experience of a planning process deeply rooted in a SWOT analysis, “[the SWOT approach] gave us a plan, but took our spirit. From our experience, drained energy and loss of spirit can negatively impact momentum and achieving results.

In SOAR, we focus on our strengths and opportunities, so that we can align and expand them until they lessen or manage our weaknesses and threats. Weaknesses and threats are not ignored. They are refrained and given the appropriate focus within the Opportunities and Results conversation. Ultimately, it becomes a question of balance. Why not spend as much time or more on what you do well and how7 you can do more of that? What gives you more energy to take action? What gives you confidence to set a stretch goal?

When I engage with a customer, I find the initial sequence of steps used to create a Lean Marketing System must ensure we carefully think through what outcomes we want to create, what supports and barriers we need to plan for, and who we have to involve within your organization to guarantee success. Our starting point looks like this:

(Definition) What are you presently doing and how do your clients and organization feel about them?
(Discovery) What is your present value proposition for retaining customers? What is your present value proposition for acquiring customers?
(Dream)What are your targets? How will we measure success?
(Design) Do you understand your customer’s decision making process? For each product/market segment?
(Destiny) What’s your investment strategy – not only in media, but in time and events?

The SOAR framework is the beginning step in the Defining stage and is a natural lead in to the others.

Strengths: Internal to organization; What is our core
Opportunities: External to organization; What might be
Aspirations: Internal to organization; What should be
Results : External to organization; What will be

The first steps of any Lean process is identify value and create a current state. When working on the demand side of the equation, why should we identify the process through Non-Value Activities defined as waste (Weaknesses and Threats) versus the Value Added activities of SOAR?