It’s Time to Upgrade Your SWOT! — Part Three
As organizational leaders, something has been percolating for a while, an intuition that we were doing something wrong. That our lenses were producing a worldview that was incomplete. That our tools didn’t match the jobs we had before us. That our investments to strengthen our organizations weren’t making us any better. Some have been oblivious to the change, like a frog slowly dying as the water boils around it. Yet our experts were delivering to us the same mindsets for strategy and organizational change that they had for the last fifty years. And honestly, we had to do something about it. Over the past several years we have been working to reformulate the lens we use to understand organizations, where their strengths and weaknesses lie in terms of their capabilities, and how a serious assessment of our organizations can help lead to actions to make us stronger. I would like to offer up a new framework for organizational assessment, design, and intervention that upgrades the SWOT with a deeper granularity, enhanced collective engagement, and a new vocabulary to better match what we need for the future.
I call the approach Transformational Lens Theory.
It is a view of organizations that both gives a deep look into what exists now as well as what can be done to specifically build the capabilities to make us stronger and to change more easily to adapt to a complex and sometimes ambiguous future. TLT articulates dimensions that enable leaders to view their organization through nine unique yet interdependent lenses. Like the SWOT, this viewpoint highlights areas of strength and potential, yet unlike the SWOT, exposes specific opportunities for intervention and improvement. To support assessment and analysis, the complementary diagnostic tool further delineates each dimension into a developmental scale which can be combined with surveys and interviews from internal organizational individuals and teams. Coupled with analysis provided by organizational leadership experts, leaders come away with an indisputable, honest look at the current state of their organization, as well as a clear sense of next steps to move forward. When leaders have a precise representation of their teams’ gaps and blind spots, only then can they be assured that their organizational analysis is accurate and useful for planning future endeavors.
Please read the full article on Medium here:
https://medium.com/@rob.brodnick/its-time-to-upgrade-your-swot-part-three-324d8ed079da