Moving Strategy from SWAT to SWOT

Companies have to move fast in the world of a voracious 24-hour news cycle that feeds on the slightest development and then spits out an issue for digestion by vast social media networks.  Small issues can become tidal waves in hours. We see it happen every day. There are no ideal solutions for dealing with the reality of instant access in a highly transparent environment. As in everything, advance strategic planning helps.  But situations that call for rapid fire decision making are usually caused by unexpected issues that are difficult to anticipate. Prior direct experience helps, but the range of possibilities confronting a business in assessing its choices can make an an individual's relevant experience one dimensional.


So, how do companies identify strategic choices when the pace accelerates or the pressure increases?


How do you try to provide a context that can rapidly find the major points you need to consider in coming to the right course of action?  Using three basic elements can provide a very useful solution when fast paced strategic decisions need to be made.

• Process:  It is surprising how many companies don't have a defined and tested process for dealing with rapid fire strategic issues. This is like responding to a fire without an escape plan. So we counsel companies to develop a clear process for identifying what to do when fast strategic decisions are required.
• Team: The second element is to assemble a small team of the right people -- usually 5-7 members who either have direct involvement in a situation and/or a cross section of related and authoritative backgrounds in specific areas. For example, if a competitor announces a disruptive technology aimed directly at a company's core market, sales, marketing, research, and product development teams are rallied together. When a new product is delayed, marketing, sales, finance and engineering meet to decide the potential impact from several aspects. When a CEO leaves, HR and PR teams are quickly aligned to develop a plan for internal and external communications.
• Tools: If a company has done 1 and 2 -- defined a process that includes access to the right SWAT team for a particular strategic choice -- the third element is to define the choices and their potential impacts to reach the best decision as fast as possible.  This is where SWAT teams need to become Strategic SWOT teams.  

Strategic SWOT starts with a traditional approach identifying internal Strengths and Weaknesses and external Opportunities and Threats.  The key to turning SWOT analysis into a strategic tool comes in the filters you apply. Here is a brief four-step process anyone can use to master this:

• First, use the S-O filter to match the internal strengths with external opportunities and list these in the upper left quadrant of a two-by-two matrix.

• Next, match internal weaknesses with external opportunities and list these as Weaknesses-Opportunities (W-O) strategies in the upper right hand quadrant.  

• Align internal strengths with external threats and list these Strengths-Threats (S-T) strategies in the lower left hand quadrant.

• Finally, use the lower right right quadrant to list Weaknesses-Threats (W-T) strategies by aligning internal weaknesses with external threats.

At this point, your SWOT list should be transformed into a number of potential strategic options to consider.

In a perfect situation, most companies would choose offense: strategies that applies company strengths toward the greatest opportunities -- S-O strategies. But rapid fire strategic decisions don't always involve opportunities to show your best stuff. In general, here is what the the other three quadrants will lead you to consider:

• W-O strategies overcome a client's weaknesses to pursue opportunities.
• S-T strategies identify ways to reduce vulnerability to external threats. 
• W-T strategies establish a defensive plan to prevent the firmʼs weaknesses from making it susceptible to external threats.

Strategic SWOT is not a perfect solution, and the strategies are not automatic.  But used properly with the right cross section of team members, it can get you a lot closer to better decision making when time constraints are the most pressing. If you've had experiences -- good or bad -- using this or another form of SWOT, we please let us know.

Strategic Tools for Strategic Content

Content is useless if it doesn’t tell a story.  A story is not very helpful if it doesn’t relate the right information about a company’s brand.  Yet, time and again, we see content-centered communications programs in the market that appear completely disconnected from brand or strategy. 

Here are three ways you can use communications as a catalyst to define real business strategies and messages into your programs:

1.  Strategic SWOT:  We’ve all done SWOT.  How do you turn it from a list to a strategic tool?  The answer is quite simple: align strengths with opportunities to identify offensive strategies.  Then align weaknesses and threats to identify defensive strategies.

2.  Develop an elevator statement: These statements have been a cornerstone of communications for years, However, in a 140-word world, they are more critical than ever.  Fortunately, there is a great new website that steps you through the process of building your elevator pitch quickly and powerfully.  Try it at Buzzuka.

3. Be clear about what you mean by strategy.  Michael Porter, the father of modern strategic thinking, said it best:  Strategy is what you choose not to do!  Clients and communications programs can get easily bloated by trying to do everything instead of trying to do the strategic thing.  Take a look at one of our earlier blogs to understand the relationship among strategy, objectives and how to use them the right way.http://www.3pointcommunications.com/Beyond%20the%20Arc/blog.php?id=3331023617869510929

Three Steps to Creating Business Objectives that Work

We often read comments urging consultants to align marketing programs with business objectives.  It sounds great. Unless, of course, your client or company hasn't specified their business objectives or, more commonly, has confused strategies with objectives. When you encounter a company like this (and you'd be surprised how many billion-dollar companies do not use objectives effectively), you have two choices: run like hell because this is a clear sign of organizational dysfunction or strap on the responsibility of helping your client define their objectives.  In most cases, we choose the second option -- better to be part of the solution than adding to the problem.  


If you choose to lead or guide your clients through this process, you immediately need to sort through the fundamental distinction between objectives, strategies and tactics. Crazy as it may seem in this era of endless analytics, companies and consulting firms often languish and struggle to get on the same page when these terms are unclear. Worse, metrics may be misaligned, misinterpreted or misunderstood when one person thinks they are talking about strategy and the other considers it an objective.


You can navigate through these situations with a simple three-step process that we call OST.  This is simply a hierarchal reminder that Objectives, Strategies and Tactics have to be developed in that hierarchal order to build actionable, successful programs. This is not rocket science, but it bears explanation for those who may know marketing, media and customers, but not business. 


1. Set objectives first:  Objectives communicate what the client organization plans to achieve. They need to be realistic, specific and measurable. A fine objective would be: To increase sales by 10% in the first quarter of 2011.


2. Follow objectives with strategies:  This may sound contrary to the way you think of strategy. Many of us are conditioned to talk about the client "strategy" or the strategy for the program as though strategy itself is what guides business.  It does not. Look back on your experience. How many great strategies have you heard that never came to fruition?  How many times have you heard frustrated or disillusioned employees talk derisively about the "strategy du jour?" There is a reason for this. Frankly, strategies without accountability are easy to articulate. They motivate, excite and even inspire people -- until they fail. We need to understand that strategies are general in nature. Untethered, they are likely to remain little more than words. Placed in the right hierarchy -- attached to specific, quantifiable objectives -- they become dynamic and charged with the energy required to make them actionable.  An acceptable strategy tied to the objective cited above would be: Cross sell the division's new WonderProduct II to existing clients.

3. Tactics drive strategies: After you have established quantifiable objectives with supporting strategies, you need to begin doing the actual work. Tactics are what you do to make strategies work. They are the building blocks of programs and they make or break the success of programs and business.  They are the phone calls, the conferences, the articles and community building that has to happen day in and day out.  While Nike's famous call to "Just Do It" rings in our ears, tactics can be disastrous in isolation of objectives and strategies -- especially as you communicate with customers, media and channel partners. Audiences will take your words at face value, and will assume you already have set objectives and strategies before going public with a program. As you have probably experienced, this is not always the case. Nothing can freeze a customer faster (and make your company or your client look ridiculous) than to suddenly stop pursuing a tactic you've been driving publicly, because somebody in the organization realized it was out of synch with an objective or strategy. In business, companies can thrive when the left hand knows what the right hand is doing. An example of a tactic is: Introduce the new Wonder Product 2 solution to all current customers in the CEO's keynote speech during Company World 2010 in October.

One final note is in order. When setting up objectives, be sure you and your clients do not tackle more than you can handle. Establishing too many objectives may make you look great to your client or boss in the beginning but it sets an unrealistic expectation that may color your performance review in the end if you are unable to achieve what you promise. If you specify more objectives than the budget enables you to accomplish, you will find your program log-jammed and bleeding dollars trying to tackle too much and ultimately achieving too little. We suggest you follow the urging of a client Marketing Vice President to simply "Do Fewer Things Better!"  Based on our experience, here are some targets to consider:

• set a maximum of four to six measurable objectives for the year 
• establish no more than three strategies for each objective, and
• create a fresh set of 5-10 tactics each quarter that align with your strategies.

It may not always be as easy as this, but it doesn't have to be much harder. Breaking down the process into the right hierarchy creates clarity and leads to specific achievable metrics for you and your client to agree upon. You do yourself and your client a great service by simply putting Objectives, Strategies and Tactics in the right hierarchy to understand how they depend on each other for success.