Meta-SWOT: introducing a new strategic

planning tool
Ravi Agarwal, Wolfgang Grassl and Joy Pahl

Ravi Agarwal is Assistant Introduction

Professor of Computer
SWOT analysis is widely taught and seemingly intuitive, but it is has come under serious
Science, Wolfgang Grassl
criticism on theoretical grounds. Critics maintain that it relies on subjective intuitions, is
is Associate Professor of
unsystematic, eschews quantification, and lacks predictive power. Its use as a stand-alone
Business Administration,
and Joy Pahl is Assistant
tool instead of a model for situational analysis as part of a more comprehensive toolset
Professor of Business for strategy development has also been criticized (Fehringer, 2007). In a comparative
Administration, all at St evaluation of 24 techniques used for strategic analysis, SWOT does not rank highly
Norbert College, De Pere, (Fleisher and Bensoussan, 2002). Not surprisingly, there is evidence that managers make
Wisconsin, USA. little use of it as a planning tool in business practice. A survey of more than 100 managers
reveals significant distrust of the method (Finnegan, 2010). According to a study based on
212 interviews with executives of Fortune 1000 companies, SWOT analysis actually harms
performance (Menon et al., 1999). Some scholars deny that SWOT analysis serves any
useful purpose at all (Hill and Westbrook, 1997; Armstrong, 1984). Another study regards the
process as so flawed that it required a ‘‘product recall’’ (Hill and Westbrook, 1997).
Yet the basic intuition behind SWOT analysis appears to be sound. It assumes that
successful strategies are based on a good fit between internal resources and external
possibilities. Distinctive capabilities and competencies of organizations must ‘‘hook onto’’
factors in the political, economic, social, technological, and regulatory environments that
require and support such competencies. There is much evidence that a strong fit between
context and resources positively impacts performance (Drazin and Van de Ven, 1985;
Lukas et al., 2001; Venkatraman and Prescott, 1990; Zajac et al., 2000; Garlichs, 2011).
Reactions by strategic planning experts to the limitations of SWOT analysis have therefore
been of two types: some simply ignore it as a useful tool in favor of other approaches
whereas others have attempted to make it more ‘‘rigid’’ and increase its validity and
usefulness for organizational purposes.
This paper takes the second approach and seeks to develop the basic model of SWOT into a
decision-support tool. The criterion of strategic fit will be preserved but embedded into a
new model of planning. What must be discarded is the rigid classification of external factors
into opportunities or threats and of internal factors into strengths or weaknesses, in favor of
decisions on a scale. The new approach still requires judgments, but these no longer have to
be made in a categorical sense, for example by classifying a factor as either a weakness or a
strength. Rather, such judgments allow for gradations and comparative evaluation. What
must also be improved is the unsystematic, ad hoc generation of factors considered in
strategy formulation. An ordered process is necessary, and it shall be driven by a seminal
A first version of this paper was idea: available resources in an organization determine suitable markets more often than
presented at the Conference of
the Marketing Management given conditions in the business environment allow for the creation of successful strategies
Association, Chicago, March to capture them. This is a key insight of the resource-based view of the firm. The new method
26-28, 2011. The co-authors
have contributed equally to this of planning thus relies on a more structured approach, facilitates analysis with competitors,
paper. and guides decision-makers in a seamless process of data elicitation to a list of prioritized

PAGE 12 j JOURNAL OF BUSINESS STRATEGY j VOL. 33 NO. 2 2012, pp. 12-21, Q Emerald Group Publishing Limited, ISSN 0275-6668 DOI 10.1108/02756661211206708
‘‘ According to experts, the quality standards for strategic
planning techniques can be summarized in the acronym
‘FAROUT’. They must be future-oriented, accurate,
resource-efficient, objective, useful, and timely. ’’

strategic objectives that are consistent with the mission of the organization. It is implemented
in a tool that has been named meta-SWOT[1].

Meta-SWOT: the theoretical rationale

Approaches to strategic planning can be classified into outside-in and inside-out models,
depending on whether the resources and capabilities of an organization or its micro- and
macro-environments are considered the levers from which to start. For decades, the
industrial organization model that economists developed in the 1930s dominated thinking
about strategy. It assumed that economic structure (or the factors that define the
competitiveness of the market) determines the conduct of firms, which in turn determines the
performance of an industry (or its success in generating profits and growth). Strategy
formulation was outside-in, basically as a process of adaptation to opportunities in the
environment. However, much research, including new thinking in economics, together with
the business experience of the last several decades, has raised the question of whether
internal factors must always adapt to external ones. Must decision-makers really take a
specific business environment as given and devise strategies to capture perceived
opportunities in order to be successful? Many relevant studies can be summarized by
saying that market-share objectives harmed profits and put the survival of firms at risk
(Armstrong and Collopy, 1996; Armstrong and Green, 2007). On the contrary, business
history shows that some of the most successful companies – one need only think of the
Hudson’s Bay Company, Red Bull, or Google – have not merely adapted to a given context
but have instead created markets and shaped their competitive environments. Based on this
insight, the resource-based view (RBV) assumes that successful organizations are driven by
their distinctive capabilities and competencies, and that a firm’s resources are therefore
more critical to the determination of strategic action than is its external environment. This
approach takes an inside-out view of strategy. After all, the situation of an organization is
better known to planners, and internal data are usually more readily available: ‘‘the RBV is an
inside-out perspective on organizations that seeks to identify the characteristics of firms with
superior performance’’ (Rouse and Daellenbach, 2002, p. 966). The guiding idea is ‘‘build
on your strengths’’ rather than ‘‘catch a star – if you can’’, for by the time organizations have
tooled up for the catch, the star may already have fallen. SWOT analysis only matches
current strengths and weaknesses with current opportunities and threats, which may have
worked decades ago but no longer fulfills the needs of a much more dynamic and volatile
business climate.
The RBV understands each firm as a unique bundle of resources typically in three
categories: tangible assets, intangible assets, and capabilities (Galbreath and Galvin,
2004). Tangible assets (e.g. financial and physical) and intangible assets are resources that
a firm has (e.g. intellectual property, organizational assets, reputation), and capabilities are
what a firm can do (e.g. its know-how). Resources and capabilities thus are different
constructs (Amit and Schoemaker, 1993). Resources are tradable and non-specific to the
firm whereas capabilities are firm-specific (because they reside in people) and are used to
engage the resources within the firm. For our purposes, strict distinctions between resources
and capabilities are not necessary (Conner, 1991; Barney, 1991). Neither do we need to
distinguish ‘‘strategic’’ resources from others, since most resources are in fact easily
imitable or tradable. It is understood that some capabilities are of a more complex nature
and are created by combining less complex resources and capabilities. In the RBV, these

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VOL. 33 NO. 2 2012 JOURNAL OF BUSINESS STRATEGY PAGE 13
 resources and capabilities are the key determinants of competitive advantage, and strategic
planning must start with them.
One challenge of course remains: how can a firm identify which of these resources and
capabilities are capable of creating a sustainable competitive advantage? Barney (1991)
sets forth four criteria for resolving this question. In order for a resource or capability to be
strategically beneficial it must be valuable, rare, inimitable, and non-substitutable. Similarly,
Prahalad and Hamel argue that in order to determine whether a capability constitutes a core
competence – a basis for a firm’s competitive advantage – the capability must grant the firm
‘‘potential access to a wide variety of markets’’ and must significantly enhance the benefits
of the final product or service as perceived by customers (Prahalad and Hamel, 1990, p. 83).
These two criteria together define if a resource or capability is ‘‘valuable’’. The other tests are
that a resource or capability must be rare relative to demand for it, difficult for competitors to
imitate, and (as a special case of inimitability) not be substitutable by another resource or
capability that competitors might develop. Firms must also be able to capture these
advantages in order to be successful.
Four criteria then define the potential of resources and capabilities for creating successful
strategy. Within the RBV, they are known as the VRIO conditions (Barney, 1991):
B V (value). Does the resource or capability enable a firm to exploit an environmental
opportunity and/or neutralize an environmental threat?
B R (rare). Is this resource or capability currently controlled by only a small number of
competing firms?
B I (inimitable). Do firms without this resource or capability face a cost disadvantage in
obtaining or developing it?
B O (organization). Are a firm’s policies and procedures organized to support the
exploitation of its valuable, rare, and costly-to-imitate resources and capabilities?
In this perspective, an organization must turn to its internal resources and capabilities to
guide its strategy process if it hopes to successfully navigate an increasingly turbulent
external environment. Scanning of the external environment then always takes place against
the background of existing internal factors. Yet conditions in the business environment still
determine which resources and capabilities can be leveraged to capture opportunities or
alleviate threats:

Nothing is a strength or a weakness except vis-à-vis the competition (Mooradian et al., 2012,
p. 224; italics in the original).

In other words, strategists cannot judge the relative merit or strategic value of a particular
internally controlled resource or capability in isolation from their assessment of the external
environment, for every internal factor either supports or does not support a potential in the
environment by allowing for it to be captured. But planning must start with what an
organization has and can do, not with a random search for opportunities in the business
environment. The VRIO criteria then prioritize these resources and capabilities with a view to
capturing the right external factors in formulating dynamic strategies (Warren, 2008,
pp. 89ff.). In this sense, the proposed approach to strategic planning is really an
inside-out-inside model. Successful planning, after all, is not a linear but an iterative process.
However, not all resources and capabilities that can be successfully leveraged must already
exist; organizational development allows for the extension of existing factors or the creation

‘‘ In order for a resource or capability to be strategically

beneficial it must be valuable, rare, inimitable, and
non-substitutable. ’’

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PAGE 14 JOURNAL OF BUSINESS STRATEGY VOL. 33 NO. 2 2012
‘‘ The deficiencies of SWOT analysis have prompted some to
improve it and others to discard it as a method for crafting
strategy. ’’

of new ones. The RBV suggests a possible trade-off between investing in existing core
competencies and investing in capabilities that could become core competencies in the
future. It has been described as the ‘‘sustainability-attain-ability dilemma’’ (Miller, 2003). A
resource or capability that meets the VRIO criteria will be sustainable by the firm that
currently possesses the resource, but it will also be hard, if not impossible, to attain others.
Therefore practitioners are left with a problem: if inimitability is the key to achieving a
competitive advantage, how can their firm act to create such advantage with resources and
capabilities it does not already have? The answer may lie in a firm’s ability to build on its
asymmetries. These are processes, skills, and assets that are unique to the firm,
non-substitutable, and inimitable; competitors cannot copy these asymmetries at a cost that
will allow them to earn economic rents. The one criterion that is thereby relaxed is ‘‘valuable.’’
Firms are able to ‘‘reconceptualize’’ these asymmetries by creating organizational
processes and designs that can realize the untapped value in them, and in doing so are
able to match them to market opportunities. This discovery is important because it adds a
crucial innovative quality to the RBV. Meta-SWOT assists decision makers in discovering
these asymmetries and in recognizing how they may become valuable to the organization in
the future.
Resources and capabilities are then evaluated according to the VRIO framework on rarity,
inimitability, and organization. The ‘‘valuable’’ criterion is not assessed in the process until
the resource in question is matched to the external environment. This is because by
definition the ‘‘value’’ of a resource resides in its ability to exploit opportunities or neutralize
threats in the external environment, and it thus operationalizes the idea of strategic fit
(Barney, 1991).
Relevant factors in the business environment are then identified independently of the internal
analysis. Political, economic, socio-cultural, technological, ecological, and legal (PESTEL)
factors need to be considered (Carpenter and Sanders, 2007, p. 91). They are judged
according to their expected impact, the probability that these trends will increase, and the
perceived urgency for the organization to address them. This assessment now allows for
judgments about strategic fit, i.e. about how well resources and capabilities support
opportunities or alleviate threats in the environment. No classification into opportunities and
threats is undertaken, in order to avoid the circularity of reasoning that is typical of SWOT
analysis, which often categorizes as opportunities those environmental forces which match
an internal strength. Since strategy needs to address both opportunities and threats, only
the ability of given resources and capabilities to deal with either is deemed relevant.
Lastly, the idea of strategic fit is also operationalized by judging the degree to which
resources and capabilities support organizational objectives. These judgments then
automatically generate a list of pairs between resources or capabilities and environmental
factors that are closest and of overriding importance. The most serious limitation of the
model is of course that combinations between an internal and an external factor may be
generated by accident but not have any real bearing on each other. The judgment of
decision-makers is indispensable here, but it comes in only at the end of a the structured
process. Factor combinations can be dropped from the list and other factor pairs rearranged
according to perceived priority. The outcome is a prioritized list of strategic priorities that
depends on all the previous assessments. According to the logic of RBV, the strength of
resources or capabilities, and their strategic fit with environmental factors, is prioritized over
the strength of these factors alone. This appears to be a crucial advantage over SWOT
analysis.

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VOL. 33 NO. 2 2012 JOURNAL OF BUSINESS STRATEGY PAGE 15
 Meta-SWOT: the method and tool
General
According to experts, the quality standards for strategic planning techniques can be
summarized in the acronym ‘‘FAROUT’’. They must be future-oriented, accurate,
resource-efficient, objective, useful, and timely (Fleisher and Bensoussan, 2002). These
criteria informed the method used in developing Meta-SWOT, which is implemented in an
Excel workbook consisting of a title sheet and seven interconnected worksheets. Its purpose
is to guide decision-makers in a seamless process from an initial phase of brain-storming to
the generation of a ranked list of strategic priorities. The tool allows for unlimited revisions of
inputs, as decision-makers change their assessment in the course of a planning exercise.
The method can easily be replicated on spreadsheets[2].
All questions are asked about the organization for which a strategy is to be developed rather
than about its competitors. Assessment of internal and external factors by way of multifactor
scoring is a standard procedure in strategy formulation. With the exception of the question
about priority levels of organizational goals, all questions are asked on a five-point scale,
which appears to allow for sufficient (or even maximum) reliability (Dawes, 2008). The order
of items is not of relevance (with the exception of the final prioritized strategy
recommendation). The process is presented in a flow diagram (Figure 1). The case under
analysis is a small specialty foods and kitchenware retailer.

Worksheets
Worksheet resources and competition collects classification data relating to the planning
project and the planning horizon, and to overall organizational objectives, which can be
weighted by their degrees of priority. It is assumed that organizational objectives are given or
defined in the context of a strategic planning exercise. Critical success factors must then be
identified that describe which resources and capabilities are required for success in the
respective industry, and their relative importance is determined on a percentage weighting
scale. In order to generate a map, the list of internal factors must be reduced by first
identifying two overriding dimensions on which companies in that particular industry
compete and by then deciding to which of them individual resources and capabilities relate.
Next, a list of competitors is generated, and the estimated sales volume of the organization in
comparison with competitors (or their respective divisions) must be indicated. The
perceived performance of the organization against each competitor on all resources and
capabilities must be estimated on a five-point scale. Differently from SWOT analysis, internal
factors are thus not generated from the mere imaginative capacity of decision-makers, but
the firm is evaluated according to how well it matches what the competitive environment
requires for success. Evaluation by soliciting judgments is not done for the firm in isolation
but always with respect to its competitors, which again relates resources and capabilities to
the competitive environment.
These decisions generate a table on worksheet competitive map which calculates the
competitive advantage of all competitors, both in absolute values and normalized to the
mean of competitors, which is defined as the sum of scores achieved on the two competitive
dimensions. The absolute and normalized rank order by competitive advantage is
calculated, and a macro reveals the closest and second-closest competitor for the
organization depending on the minimization of distance in Euclidean space. A map allows
for a visualization of the competitive field as defined by the previous data input. It may be
under-stood as a positioning map reflecting the perceptions of decision-makers (Figure 2).

‘‘ In a comparative evaluation of 24 techniques used for

strategic analysis, SWOT does not rank highly. ’’

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PAGE 16 JOURNAL OF BUSINESS STRATEGY VOL. 33 NO. 2 2012
Figure 1 Flow diagram of meta-SWOT

Identification of Identification of
organization competition
Planning project Objectives Competitors
INPUT OF DECISIONS
“RESOURCES AND COMPETITION”
Planning period Critical success factors Relative business size

Competitive dimensions Qualitative comparison

Competitive map
Calculation of competitive advantage OUTPUT SCREEN
Ranking of closest and second-closed competitor “COMPETITIVE MAP”

Internal analysis External analysis

Weighting of factors Identification of factors

Rarity Weighting of factors INPUT OF DECISIONS

“(V)RIO”
Imitability Evaluation of impact and
“BUSINESS ENVIRONMENT”
Organization
Probability of increase

Degree of urgency

Evaluation of
strategic fit
INPUT OF DECISIONS
Internal/external factors “FIT”

Fit with objectives

OUTPUT SCREEN
Strategy map “STRATEGY MAP”

OUTPUT SCREEN
Matched list by priorities
and
Decision on feasibility and
INPUT OF DECISIONS
priority
“STRATEGY MAP”

The worksheet (V)RIO serves to collect data about the evaluation of resources and
capabilities of the organization according to the VRIO framework (by leaving ‘‘value’’ to a
future step). Answers about degrees of agreement are elicited to the following statements:
1. Rarity:
B (R1) Our competitors cannot do this.
B (R2) Our competitors do not have this.
B (R3) Our competitors cannot acquire this.
2. Imitability:
B (I1) Our competitors cannot copy this.
B (I2) Our competitors cannot easily develop this.
3. Organization:
B (O1) We benefit from this factor through our re-porting structure.

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VOL. 33 NO. 2 2012 JOURNAL OF BUSINESS STRATEGY PAGE 17
Figure 2 Screen shot of competitive map

Competitive Map Competitive Advantage

0.0 0.5 1.0 1.5 2.0 2.5 3.0 3.5 4.0 4.5 5.0
5.0 Price-quality range Degree of service Sum Rank
Absolute Normalized Absolute Normalized Abs. Norm. Absolute Normalized
Williams and Sonoma 2.92 1.08 2.75 1.11 5.66 2.19 3 3
4.5 Pottery Barn 2.29 0.84 2.55 1.03 4.83 1.87 5 5
Target 2.47 0.91 2.14 0.86 4.61 1.77 6 6
Cook’s Corner 2.10 0.78 2.00 0.81 4.10 1.58 7 7
4.0
Pete’s Cuisine 3.45 1.27 2.90 1.17 6.35 2.45 2 2
Macy’s 3.02 1.12 2.53 1.02 5.55 2.14 4 4
Jill’s Pantry 3.5 0 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0 0
0 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0 0
0 0
Degree or service offered

0 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00

3.0 Mean = 2.71 1.00 2.48 1.00
Pete’s Cuisine
Williams and Jill’s Pantry 3.29 1.22 3.52 1.42 6.82 2.64 1 1
Sonoma
Pottery Barn Macy’s 2.5 Strongest competitors for Jill’s Pantry

Closest Competitor Pete’s Cuisine

Target
Cook’s Corner 2.0 Follow-up Competitor Williams and Sonoma

1.5

1.0

0.5 Full
Screen
On/Off
0.0
Price-quality range

B (O2) We benefit from this factor through our budgeting process.

B (O3) We benefit from this factor through our compensation policy.
For some planning purposes, the three organizational items may appear of little relevance,
or answers cannot be given. Choice of the ‘‘neutral’’ option prevents these items from
influencing the aggregate average scores. Items carry equal weight, and the interval level of
measurement is assumed.
The worksheet business environment elicits an identification of relevant PESTEL factors and
an estimate of their relative importance. Both the statics and dynamics of the environment
are assessed by deciding on the likely impact of external factors on the success of the
organization (as operationalized by organizational objectives) and on the probability that
these factors will increase in importance over the planning period. The degree of urgency of
addressing the respective factors is assessed independently in order to avoid strong
assumptions about consistency in judgments. The question about urgency introduces a time
scale into the measurement exercise and facilitates the generation of prioritized strategic
action steps.
The worksheet FIT asks decision-makers to decide, for each resource and capability, to
which degree it relates to the important factors in the external environment. If an internal
factor has no obvious bearing on an external factor, ‘‘very weakly’’ should be chosen. Fit is
measured by the number of internal factors and how strongly they collectively match
external factors. The average aggregate score represents the ‘‘value’’ of resources and
capabilities in the VRIO model. The use of a continuous scale is expected to mitigate the
problem of uncertainty in the categorization of factors into strengths or weaknesses. Lastly,
the fit of resources and capabilities with organizational objectives is assessed by the degree
of perceived match. It expresses the intuition that a resource may strongly correspond to an
environmental factor without being very relevant for the organization.
Based on these decisions, a chart is automatically displayed on the worksheet strategy map
that depicts the previous assessment and visualizes the subsequent generation of action
steps. Resources and capabilities (blue bubbles) are located towards the right of the chart if
they are relatively rare and inimitable and enjoy organizational fitness. They are positioned
towards the upper end if they are characterized by a high degree of strategic fit; the bubble

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 size expresses the degree of fit with objectives. The relevant factors of the business
environment are plotted on the same chart, horizontal positions expressing perceived
strength of impact, vertical positions expected increase, and sizes of bubbles express
degrees or urgency. For both sets of data, locations in the upper-right quadrant indicate high
ratings on both dimensions, and locations towards the right or the upper edge of the chart
high ratings on at least one dimension of measurement. The third is the relative bubble
size (Figure 3).
On the worksheet strategy development, pairs of internal and external factors are
automatically generated based on three criteria: minimization of distance between the two
types of factors, location maximally to the right and the upper edge, and bubble sizes. The
list is subjected to judgments by decision-makers as to which combinations have a true
bearing on each other such that an internal factor supports an external one. Irrelevant pairs
can be dropped, and for perceived matches, three degrees of priority can be expressed.
The list is then reordered to formulate the outcome of the planning exercise – a prioritized
strategy.

And so what?
The deficiencies of SWOTanalysis have prompted some to improve it and others to discard it
as a method for crafting strategy. Managers tend to attribute to it only a modest usefulness
for actual planning exercises but still regard it as a valuable tool for structuring thought
(Finnegan, 2010). Meta-SWOT therefore seeks to reinvent SWOT analysis in a substantially
altered form by retaining its basic approach. The new method removes many of the
shortcomings of SWOT by being more future-oriented, accurate, resource-centered,
objective, useful, and timely. No longer are all factors of equal weight, since quantification at
the ordinal level is possible. This allows for differentiation between factors according to their
importance. The tool still relies on subjective judgment, and to some extent this will remain

Figure 3 Worksheet strategy map

Strategy Map
Full
0.00 0.50 1.00 1.50 2.00 2.50 3.00 3.50 4.00 4.50 5.00 Screen
On/Off
Competition from other
Costs of retail space retailers
5.00

Resources and
4.50 Capabilities
Complementary
sales channels
Customer service
Supplier power Online business 4.00

Customer loyalty Product assortment

Advertising
Culture of organization
and promotion 3.50

Location
Narrowing of margins Interest in cooking Economic recession
3.00
Strategic fit

2.50
Store aesthetics
Relative price level
Healthier lifestyles 2.00

Financial resources
1.50

Social media 1.00

0.50

0.00
Strength of factor

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 indispensable in strategic planning. However, comparative assessment could be converted
to metric measurement wherever data are available. Maybe most importantly, ideas derived
from the RBV of the firm make meta-SWOT more guided by the resources and capabilities of
organizations than simply by market opportunities, without eschewing the importance
Keywords: of finding a good match between internal and external factors. Strategy-making is
Strategic planning, understood as a matching process driven by what an organization controls and is good at
SWOT analysis, rather than by often unattainable opportunities in the business environment. Steps in a
VRIO model, strategic action plan are prioritized by their degree of urgency or timeliness. By guiding the
Resource-based view, process of strategy formulation in a systematic and iterative fashion rather than jumping to
Strategic fit, conclusions, Meta-SWOT is a more reliable aid for decision-making than most of the
Spreadsheets alternatives proposed in the literature.

Notes
1. The Greek preposition meta has three basic meanings that express what the new method intends to
accomplish. Meta means ‘‘after’’ in the temporal or spatial sense, ‘‘(together) with’’, and in
composites it signifies change (as in ‘‘metabolism’’ or ‘‘metaphor’’). Meta-SWOT wants to change
and amend SWOT analysis and in this sense replace it.
2. A copy of the Excel file can be requested from the corresponding author: ravi.agarwal@snc.edu

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About the authors

Ravi Agarwal is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at St. Norbert College in
Wisconsin. His areas of expertise include software engineering and processes and usability
studies. Ravi Agarwal is the corresponding author and can be contacted at:
ravi.agarwal@snc.edu
Wolfgang Grassl is Associate Professor of Business Administration at St Norbert College
specializing in marketing strategy, business ontology, and Catholic social thought.
Joy Pahl, an Assistant Professor of Business Administration at St Norbert’s, specializes in
international business and strategic management.

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