By the 1990s, in Terry Hill and Roy Westbrook’s description, SWOT analysis was one of the most popular approaches to developing corporate strategy. You listed a business’s strengths and weaknesses, the opportunities and threats around it, and you had a picture to plan from.
Hill and Westbrook set out to look at what those pictures actually contained. They studied SWOTs that consultants had used to understand a business from a corporate perspective, as part of a British Department of Trade and Industry program, the Manufacturing Planning and Implementation Scheme.
They reviewed 50 companies in the scheme. More than 20 of them had used a SWOT, and those SWOTs involved 14 different consulting firms.
Fourteen firms might have been expected to produce fourteen styles. They didn’t. According to the authors, all the applications looked alike. The lists were long, with more than 40 factors on average. The descriptions were general and, in the authors’ words, “often meaningless.” Nobody had put the factors in order of importance. Nobody had made any attempt to check whether the points were true.
None of that was the worst of it. The authors called one finding “the most worrying”: no one subsequently used the outputs in the later stages of the strategy process. The SWOTs were done, and the strategy work that followed did not draw on them.
Hill and Westbrook published the review in the journal Long Range Planning in February 1997. They concluded that the continued use of SWOT analysis “needs to be questioned,” and gave the article a title that made the point for them: “SWOT analysis: It’s time for a product recall.”
The tool was not recalled. Twenty-six years later, Long Range Planning published a paper by Richard Puyt, Finn Birger Lie and Celeste Wilderom that called SWOT “one of the oldest and most widely adopted strategy tools worldwide” and cited Hill and Westbrook’s title as an example of the criticism it had drawn.
That paper went looking for where the tool came from. Its authors argued that the original version, designed for corporate planning in the 1960s, had asked every manager to grade each planning issue with evidence, and had sent the managers’ proposals on to the executive planning committee. If they are right, the first version included two of the steps the consultants’ lists left out.