SWOT Analysis: The Case for Abolition vs. Radical Reform
01 July 2025
In strategy sessions, the SWOT analysis—comprising Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats—is a standard tool in business plans and marketing. However, it often results in vague, generic statements, such as "strong brand" or "increasing competition," which apply to many companies. Although teams complete this exercise, it rarely produces actionable plans and often feels like a waste of time.
Let's look at SWOT analysis from two perspectives. In one corner, we have renowned strategic thinker Roger Martin, who argues that the SWOT analysis is so fundamentally flawed it's time to toss it "into the ashbin of strategy history." He views it as an aimless exercise that yields no insight. In the other corner, we have hotel industry practitioner Chris Legaspi, who represents a different school of thought: the problem isn't the tool, but the user. Legaspi argues that a properly structured and rigorously executed SWOT analysis can serve as a powerful catalyst for making informed, actionable decisions.
So, who is right? Is SWOT a broken relic from a bygone era of strategic planning, or can it be saved? This post will break down both powerful arguments, exploring the case for abolition and the guide to radical reform. By the end, you'll be able to decide for yourself whether to abandon the four boxes or transform them into a tool that actually works.
The Abolitionist: Roger Martin's Case for Tossing SWOT
Roger Martin doesn't just think we should improve the SWOT analysis; he believes it's beyond saving. In his view, the tool isn't just poorly done, it is fundamentally and fatally flawed from the very start. It's not a tool we're using incorrectly; it's the wrong tool for the job. His argument rests on a few powerful pillars.
The Fatal Flaw: Analysis Without Context
The biggest problem with SWOT, according to Martin, is that it asks questions in the wrong order. To determine if something is a "strength," you first need to know what you're trying to achieve. Martin defines strategy as a specific Where-to-Play/How-to-Win (WTP/HTW) choice. Are you going to win by being the lowest-cost provider, the most innovative, or the one with the best customer service?
A quality is only a strength or a weakness of that choice. For example, having a massive, sprawling product line might be a key strength if your strategy is to be a one-stop shop for corporate clients. But if you plan to be a nimble, low-cost innovator, that same product line becomes a weakness; it creates complexity, slows you down, and increases costs.
Since teams typically perform a SWOT analysis at the beginning of a strategy process, before making the critical WTP/HTW choice, they conduct it in a vacuum. They cannot determine what qualifies as a relevant strength, a critical weakness, a viable opportunity, or a genuine threat. The result, as Martin points out, is an analysis that is inevitably generic, bland, and fails to produce a single "blinding insight."
It's Data Mining, Not Science
Martin also criticizes SWOT for being unscientific. A rigorous, scientific analysis begins with a hypothesis—a clear theory that you then test with data. The SWOT process does the opposite. It's an exercise in aimless data collection, a fishing expedition where you dump information into four vague buckets and hope a brilliant strategy magically emerges.
Martin calls this "data mining," and warns that if you "torture data enough, it will give you something!" Without a guiding hypothesis, the process encourages us to find meaningless correlations, or even worse, allows leaders to steer the analysis toward their pre-existing biases while claiming it's an objective process.
Martin's Alternative: The Hypothesis-Driven Approach
Instead of the directionless SWOT, Martin advocates for a more disciplined, scientific method. He argues that strategy should be a series of choices, not a laundry list of observations. His alternative process looks like this:
- Start with the Problem: Define the gap between your current results and your aspirations. What specific challenge are you trying to solve?
- Frame Possibilities: Generate a few distinct possibilities for how you might close that gap. These are your potential WTP/HTW choices.
- Form a Hypothesis: For each possibility, ask the most crucial question in strategy: "What Would Have To Be True (WWHTBT) for this to be a winning choice?" This list of necessary truths becomes your set of hypotheses.
- Test What Matters: Identify the assumptions on your WWHTBT list that you are least confident about. These are your most significant risks.
Then, and only then, would you be able to conduct analysis. But it's not a broad, mile-wide SWOT. It's a deep, inch-wide investigation explicitly designed to test the critical assumptions your strategy depends on. This, Martin argues, is how you generate real, valuable insight and make choices with confidence.
The Reformist: Chris Legaspi's Guide to SWOT Done Right
While Roger Martin makes a compelling case for abolition, Chris Legaspi offers a powerful counter-argument: don't toss the tool, transform it. Legaspi acknowledges that the typical SWOT is a lazy, ineffective exercise. However, he argues that the problem isn't the framework itself, but rather the lack of rigor in its application. For Legaspi, a reformed SWOT can be a sharp, actionable, and indispensable part of your strategic toolkit.
Here are his key fixes to rescue SWOT from mediocrity.
Fixing the Context Problem: Start Outside-In
Legaspi's most crucial insight directly addresses Martin's "analysis without context" critique. The fix is simple but profound: do the SWOT backwards. Instead of starting with an internal list of your strengths and weaknesses, start with the external environment.
By analyzing Opportunities and Threats first, you establish the market landscape. What are the emerging trends, competitive pressures, and market shifts you're facing? This creates the vital context that is otherwise missing. Only then do you turn inward to assess your Strengths and Weaknesses. The question shifts from "What are we good at?" to "Given the external reality, what do we have (or lack) that will help us win?" Reordering the process ensures your internal analysis aligns with the world you actually operate in.
From Vague Lists to Actionable Insights
A list is not a strategy. Legaspi provides a clear path to turn passive observations into active strategic moves.
Use TOWS for Action: The four boxes of SWOT are just the ingredients. The real strategic thinking happens when you combine them using the TOWS matrix. This means explicitly asking:
- S-O: How can we leverage our Strengths to seize Opportunities?
- W-O: What must we fix in our Weaknesses to pursue Opportunities?
- S-T: How can we use our Strengths to defend against Threats?
- W-T: How can we minimize our Weaknesses to reduce our exposure to Threats?
Write Like You Mean It: Vague phrases like "good service" are useless. Legaspi insists on using specific, complete sentences that describe a cause and effect. Instead of "weak brand," write "Slow complaint response time is driving a loss in our online ratings." This specificity makes the issue tangible and measurable.
Link Cause to Action: To bake action directly into the framework, use this sentence structure: "Given [the external condition], our ability to [perform this internal factor] leads us to recommend [a specific action]." This turns a bullet point into a clear, defensible recommendation.
Making It a Rigorous Decision Tool
Finally, Legaspi argues for adding layers of discipline to transform SWOT from a brainstorming exercise into an accurate decision-making tool.
- Score and Weight It: Don't treat all points as equal. Assign a weight (importance) and a score (performance) to each item. By multiplying them, you get a weighted score that helps you rank and prioritize. This focuses your energy on the issues that will have the most significant impact.
- Make It a Team Sport: A SWOT created in a C-suite silo is a fantasy. Legaspi advocates for involving sales, operations, marketing, and customer support. Each department sees a different facet of the business, and their combined input ensures the analysis reflects the ground-truth reality, not just head-office assumptions.
- Tie It Directly to Revenue Strategy: This is the ultimate litmus test. A successful SWOT doesn't get filed away; its conclusions show up in your pricing tables, your channel mix, your promotional calendar, and your staffing plans. If the analysis doesn't drive concrete changes in how you operate and market yourself, it has failed.
Synthesis: A Unified Path Forward
After exploring two compelling but conflicting views, you might wonder which path to take. Should you toss SWOT into the ashbin with Roger Martin or reform it with Chris Legaspi? The most powerful approach combines both.
The path forward isn't about choosing a side, but about combining the wisdom of both thinkers to create a vastly more effective strategic process.
Finding the Common Ground
First, let's acknowledge the crucial point of agreement: the traditional, lazy, context-free SWOT analysis is useless. Both Martin, the theorist, and Legaspi, the practitioner, arrive at this same conclusion. They agree that filling four boxes with vague observations wastes everyone's time. They disagree not on the problem but on the solution, making their shared diagnosis the starting point.
Creating a Hybrid Model: Martin's 'Why' Meets Legaspi's 'How'
Instead of viewing their ideas as mutually exclusive, we can integrate them into a powerful two-step process that leverages Martin's high-level strategic discipline and Legaspi's tactical rigor.
Step 1 (The Martin Foundation): Set the Strategic Context First. Before you even think about the word "SWOT," begin with Roger Martin's hypothesis-driven approach. Define the core problem or aspiration you need to address. Then, generate two to three distinct, potential strategic choices for your organization. These are your "How might we..." statements or potential "Where-to-Play/How-to-Win" scenarios. This crucial first step creates the context that a traditional SWOT analysis so badly lacks.
Step 2 (The Legaspi Deep Dive): Analyze Each Choice with a Reformed SWOT. Once you have a specific strategic possibility on the table, use Chris Legaspi's reformed SWOT/TOWS as the focused analytical tool to evaluate it. For each potential strategy from Step 1, you now run a disciplined analysis:
- Example: Imagine one of your potential strategic choices is "to become the market leader in luxury eco-friendly travel."
- Analysis: You would now conduct Legaspi's "outside-in" SWOT specifically for that choice. You'd start by analyzing the opportunities (e.g., growing demand for sustainable tourism) and threats (e.g., new regulations, "greenwashing" competitors) within the luxury eco-travel niche. Then, you would assess your strengths (e.g., exclusive property locations) and weaknesses (e.g., high energy consumption) to winning in that specific market.
In this hybrid model, the SWOT is no longer a generic, upfront exercise. It becomes a sharp, tactical tool used to rigorously test a specific strategic hypothesis, satisfying both Martin's call for context and Legaspi's demand for actionable insight.
The New Litmus Test
Ultimately, the label you give your analysis matters far less than the results it produces. Whether you call it a SWOT or a "Strategic Choice Analysis," it must pass a simple test. A successful analysis doesn't just fill a slide; it forces a decision. It must clearly and directly answer four critical questions:
- What are we investing in? (Where will we commit resources to grow?)
- What are we protecting? (Which core strengths must we defend?)
- What are we fixing? (Which weaknesses are too dangerous to ignore?)
- What are we walking away from? (What will we stop doing to enable our new focus?)
If your strategy session can't produce clear answers to those questions, the exercise has failed. If it can, you've moved beyond observation and into the realm of real strategy.
Conclusion: It's Not the Tool, It's the Thinking
The simple four-box grid of the SWOT analysis stands at a crossroads. The classic version has broken down, becoming a relic from a time when any framework seemed better than none. On the one hand, Roger Martin compellingly argues for its complete abandonment, urging us to adopt the more rigorous, scientific process of hypothesis testing. On the other hand, Chris Legaspi provides a clear and practical roadmap for its salvation, showing how to reform it into a sharp, actionable tool.
Ultimately, the final takeaway is that the goal is not to "complete a SWOT"; the goal is to make smarter, braver strategic decisions. The real value of this debate isn't in declaring a winner, but in what it teaches us about our approach to strategy. It forces us to be more critical and more intentional with all of our analytical tools. It reminds us that a framework is only as good as the critical thinking that powers it.
The next time you or your team conduct a SWOT analysis, start by challenging the premise instead of mindlessly filling in the boxes. Be the one in the room who elevates the conversation by asking the questions that truly matter:
- What specific strategic question are we trying to answer with this analysis?
- Are we starting with the external environment to ensure we have context?
- How, exactly, will this grid lead us to a concrete action or a difficult decision?
That is how you move past the ceremony of strategy and into the real work. It's how you turn a tired exercise into a powerful engine for competitive advantage.