Sustainability swot
Step 4
overview
The World Resources Institute (WRI), working with a dozen companies across several sectors, reframed the familiar SWOT tool. The sustainability SWOT (sSWOT) can help you drive action and collaboration on social and environmental challenges. It involves eight questions and a new path for assessing Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats.
The sSWOT can help you engage and inspire colleagues and organizers to see connections between the trends shaping tomorrow and create strategies to make that future more sustainable. Instead of starting the analysis with a focus on the group or organization, you start with a focus on the big changes that create risks and opportunities for long-term value creation.
Note that while the sSWOT helps you shape how you implement your solutions, Vortex Methodology should be used to shape what your solutions are before you complete this exercise. After identifying the solutions that we should utilize based on the assets and resources of our community with Vortex Methodology, we then determine how best to implement those solutions by identifying trends and forces with the sSWOT tool.
using the sswot: project timeline and checklist
Like the traditional SWOT tool, the sSWOT can be used in many different settings and for many different purposes. The sSWOT tool is designed to be adapted as needed, so the checklist below is only illustrative of how projects might look. The preparatory work might take 12-24 hours of your time. The analysis itself might take 6-10 hours and the follow up may take 4-6 hours.
shaping your sswot analysis
Focus on what you as community organizer must do: translate sustainability into terms that colleagues and other organizers can get excited about. Start with initial discussions in a small group of trusted colleagues (your “team”). Identify clear objectives for the sSWOT analysis and translate the questions as needed. Then, find time to connect with critical stakeholders and consolidate and present initial sSWOT insights to a group. The sSWOT should allow everyone to look at social/environmental challenges in a familiar framework, but from a different perspective.
