SWOT maps the room, not the market

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A SWOT describes what the participants believe

Beliefs are not the same thing as the company, and often worth more. The grid is not thrown out: useless for gathering, the best there is for discussing.

1My anchor: since the nineties

Not "I learned this over time" but "I saw it early on – thirty years only confirmed it".

Few in the room know competitors beyond their brochures: prices, delivery capacity, customers' appetite to switch.
As blind to their own strengths as to their weaknesses, management included.
The exception: a company that gathers market data systematically and can look at itself
→ but that company has no need for a SWOT workshop (a subordinate clause is enough)
2Three structural flaws

Flaws in strategic use – a fast, rhythmic one-two-three.

A still frame of a moving world. A strength AI will commoditise within a year sits in its box like a permanent advantage.
Every sticky note weighs the same. The sales director's hunch next to a fact from the accounts, unweighted.
Four boxes fake a balance. One thing decides, and the rest is wallpaper.
3A fourth flaw: social danger
Five out of six write "sales is our weakness" – with the sales director at the same table.
"Praise in public, criticise in private" cannot work in a method that collects criticism on a flip chart for everyone to see.
A divisive opening can cost the mood of the whole autumn's strategy work.
4The judo throw: gather elsewhere, discuss in the grid

The grid moves to the job it fits. The message to the client is not "you are wrong" but "this needs one thing before use".

Gather views before the workshop – in writing, in private. (This solves branch 3 as well.)
Everyone marks each of their points: belief or proven?
Many notice while writing that their strongest opinion has no evidence behind it.
A SWOT is the company's Rorschach test: the result describes the viewers. That is why it is worth doing.
proven → into the strategy work
beliefs → show what the company is really being run on
Alongside it, a machine's analysis from public sources (branch 5 opens this).
The grid only as the format for discussion – shared literacy: every management team and board reads it without an introduction.
the workshop is facilitated towards a shared reading and decisions
At the discussion stage the grid is socially safe, because the criticism was gathered beforehand.
5A machine's SWOT alongside

What is new in the article – possible only for the last couple of years.

An agent makes the same SWOT from public sources alone: websites, annual accounts, job ads, customer comments. In hours, without a single confidential document.
The room's views and the machine's analysis side by side, in the same grid → the difference is the result of the whole exercise.
difference = a blind spot, or a strength you have told no one about
The same trick the other way: competitors' SWOTs in no time
→ the basic problem of the nineties got a remedy that takes a few hours (the arc closes back to branch 1)
A machine can say what a colleague cannot.
6The autumn strategy season (CTA)
Strategy days fall in September and October. Have the machine's analysis made – of yourselves and your competitors – before your own day; it is ready in hours.
The pictures match → the self-image is healthy. They differ → the strategy day has found where its discussion starts.
7PS.

The sharpest observations go last.

PS. Limiting it to public sources is deliberate: confidential material does not go into a general-purpose tool, and the picture has to be seen through the market's eyes.
PPS. (the sting, the point as advice) If a consultant brings a ready SWOT template to your strategy day, ask one question: where does the content come from? If the answer is "the room", ask for it in writing beforehand – the template is not the problem, the way it is gathered is.
My anchor: since the nineties Three structural flaws A fourth flaw: social danger The judo throw: gather elsewhere, discuss in the grid A machine's SWOT alongside The autumn strategy season (CTA) PS.