Two researchers, Terry Hill and Roy Westbrook, went through the strategy work of 50 companies in a British government program, the Department of Trade and Industry’s Manufacturing Planning and Implementation Scheme. The consultants working with them used SWOT as part of understanding a business from a corporate perspective.
More than 20 of the companies had a SWOT: a grid of strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. Those SWOTs came from 14 different consulting firms, and they all looked alike. The lists ran to more than 40 factors on average. The descriptions were general and, in the authors’ words, “often meaningless.” No one had ranked the factors. No one had tried to check whether any of them were true.
Then came what the authors called “the most worrying” finding. Once the SWOTs were done, no one used them in the later stages of the strategy process.
Their 1997 article was titled “SWOT analysis: It’s time for a product recall.”
Four boxes, no bottom
A SWOT sorts the good, bad, promising and risky. If no choice follows, it’s just a list.
The grid is easy to start and hard to finish. Strengths and weaknesses are usually read as being about the organization itself; opportunities and threats as being about the world outside. Almost anything a manager knows fits in one of the four boxes, and nothing in the format asks which item matters most, how you know it, or what you’d do about it. “Strong brand” and “changing customer needs” can sit in the grid for years without anyone having to prove or act on them.
Pack for a trip before you know where you’re going and everything might be useful, so everything goes in. Four boxes with no limit work the same way. That’s how you get to 40 factors.
What Hill and Westbrook saw was one slice of practice: consultants’ SWOTs in one British scheme, a little over 20 of them. Their review doesn’t show that every SWOT goes unused. It does show SWOTs from fourteen different firms sharing the same gaps.
A tool nobody can quite trace
One account starts with Albert Humphrey, who had worked in a planning group at the Stanford Research Institute. In a 2005 alumni newsletter, as later researchers quote him, he wrote that “SWOT analysis comes from research conducted at SRI from 1960 to 1970.” A 2011 paper put it bluntly: “there is no documented history of SWOT.”
In 2023, Richard Puyt, Finn Birger Lie and Celeste Wilderom, who quote both of those lines, published an archival history in the same journal that had run the “product recall.” It names the originator as Robert Franklin Stewart, who led that SRI planning group in the 1960s; Humphrey was a member. Lie, one of the authors, is the custodian of the group’s archive, which the paper draws on.
The paper also takes on a rival story, that SWOT was a Harvard invention. Harvard’s 1965 textbook Business Policy does say, as the paper quotes it, that a company’s “strengths and weaknesses must be appraised,” but by the authors’ reading it never presents SWOT as a tool. William Guth, one of that book’s authors, told them in 2017 he was “very confident” no one on the Harvard business policy faculty of the period created the two-by-two. Who first changed Stewart’s labels into the four we use now, the paper does not say.
What the first version asked for
Stewart’s tool, by this account, was called SOFT. It asked every manager in the firm to write down 8 to 10 planning issues from their own unit and grade each one, with evidence, as Satisfactory, an Opportunity, a Fault or a Threat. Satisfactory and Fault described present operations; Opportunity and Threat looked to the future. Each grade came as a question about action: what must be done to safeguard the satisfactory, open the door to opportunities, fix the cause of faults, thwart the threats.
Then the work began. In a company with 100 managers, the authors estimate, that meant about a thousand forms. Planners were to remove duplicates, typically leaving around 200 issues, and group them into families. Groups of managers would talk them through, and their proposals would go to the executive planning committee.
That version had evidence attached to every item and a path from the forms into the plan. Whether it worked better in practice is another question. The authors themselves write that archival research into how SOFT was actually used is still needed.
The bike shop’s twenty-eight lines
Imagine you run a bike shop and you’re deciding whether to start repairing e-bikes. Your SWOT has 28 lines. “Fast repairs” is a strength. “Online competition” is a threat. Every line is true, and none of them tells you what to do.
Rewrite three of them the SOFT way. How fast, and how do you know? Forty of your last fifty reviews mention that repairs come back within three days. So the question becomes: what must be done to keep three-day repairs if e-bikes start filling the workshop? Now the line has evidence behind it, and it points at the decision.
You might still say yes to e-bikes. But you’d know which strength you were putting at risk. As for the rest, keep only the lines that would change this decision and that you can back with evidence.
Hill and Westbrook found more than 40 factors in the average list. Stewart, if the history is right, asked each manager for eight to ten, every one with evidence and a question about what must be done.