Swot Analysis Using General Morphological Analysis

• Issue 15 15 In their seminal paper, Hill and Westbrook2 from London Business School cited that seasoned strategy professionals displayed similar deficiencies when performing a SWOT analysis — “long lists (over 40 factors on average), general (often meaningless) descriptions, a failure to prioritize and no attempt to verify any points.” Most worrying was the universal finding that noone subsequently used the outputs in the later stages of the strategy formulation. The more pertinent question remained: what, if any, was the output? In this paper, we report a major improvement of how a SWOT should be constructed and analysed by using the process of Cross Consistency Assessment (CCA), transforming it into an actionable framework. Here, each and every suggestion from each quadrant is compared pairwise to test for compatibility. The CCA is similar to a cross impact analysis except that no directional or causal linkage is assumed but merely mutual consistency in the arguments. CCA is actually an essential element of General Morphological Analysis3 (GMA), a problem structuring method, which we have reported before in this journal4 that permits the structuring and analysis of highdimensional problems. Such problem complexes are often nonquantifiable, contain ineradicable uncertainties and cannot be causally simulated or modelled in a meaningful way.