Should It Stay or Should It Go? Developing an Enhanced SWOT Framework for Teaching Strategy Formulation

Abstract

Strategy educators have employed SWOT analysis for decades as a means of teaching strategy formulation to students. Despite this well-established practice, many scholars and practitioners have called for discontinuing it as a pedagogical tool for several reasons, including that traditional undergraduate students may lack the practical experience to employ SWOT correctly, the framework presents “messy” strategic problems as overly rational, or it represents as an ambiguous and/or atheoretical classification system. We suggest possible remedies for SWOT analysis problems that may help improve its usefulness and promote its continued use. After briefly reviewing its original formulation, current textbook descriptions, and frequent criticisms, we present a refined and enhanced SWOT framework, anchored in extant strategy research and learning theory. We then demonstrate the efficacy of this enhanced framework with examples and preliminary data. Our fundamental conclusion is that SWOT analysis, when properly employed, remains a useful overarching framework that, among other advantages, helps bridge the “theory versus practice” pedagogical debate on how best to teach strategy formulation.