Look Beyond Before You Look Within

Gap analysis is the bread and butter of strategy. It’s unfortunate that we often handicap ourselves when we do it.

“Here’s where we are. Here’s what we have, and what we lack, today. And now here’s where we want to be.” How we bridge the gaps between those two states is the story of every organization’s success. But most of them routinely start this exercise just as I did here, and conduct it in that sequence of steps, from the vantage point of the present. And they wind up fixated on their limitations instead of inspired by the possibilities.

SWOT analysis (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats) is a ubiquitous form of gap analysis. This recent piece in Harvard Business Review gets at my point, in its suggestion to flip the process on its head for better effect.

When you start with a self-assessment of strengths and weaknesses, you tell yourself: this is what we can do, and what we can’t. Your subsequent evaluation of opportunities and threats is inherently truncated by that view of yourself – especially the “we can’t” part. More often than not, that bias bleeds over into how you view the gaps – as in, we can’t close them. Or at least, it will be hard to.

Starting instead with the opportunities and threats lets you prioritize the “what we aspire to” part of the gap analysis. Spend your time there first. Imagine what your organization looks like and how it operates when you’re bringing to bear the capabilities you need to carpe diem.

Then you can look inside, at the reality of the strengths and weaknesses you have today. In my experience, and the experience of clients I’ve helped do this, you’ll look at your resources and other internal factors with a different filter. What you see will surprise you. Like how you can leverage or hone or add to what you have, in ways you might not otherwise have considered.

The gaps look different – more resolvable – from the outside in, from the future back to the present. And when you see them, and see your organization, that way, they actually become more resolvable.