Template · Strategy & competition
SWOT Analysis template
For getting a team's view of strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats onto one page, with evidence, before deciding anything. Leave it alone when you need decisions; it organises evidence and contains no way to choose. Instead TOWS, which turns the four lists into choices; SWOT only organises the evidence.
Download it
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Or work it through here
Work quadrant by quadrant, keep each entry evidenced and comparative, then cut every quadrant to its strongest three to five items. Your entries persist for this browser session and can be copied out as Markdown or printed.
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What you may do with it
This sheet, meaning our drawing and layout of it, is released under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International. Use it commercially, put it in a client deck, print it for a workshop, adapt it. Keep the attribution line that is printed on the sheet and you have met the licence.
Originator: Contested; commonly attributed to Albert S. Humphrey and the long-range planning team at Stanford Research Institute, with strong parallel roots in the Harvard Business School business-policy tradition of Learned, Christensen, Andrews and Guth. The framework itself is not ours to license, and the written entry behind this page, its worked example, critiques and sources, stays all rights reserved. The full licence position is set out in plain English.
Before you fill it in
A blank template is the easy part. The entry behind it covers how to run SWOT Analysis properly, a worked example, the pitfalls real teams hit, and the situations where it is the wrong tool and something else would serve better.