SOAR Analysis
SOAR asks four forward-looking questions, what are we good at, where's the opportunity, what do we aspire to, how will we know, in place of SWOT's mix of strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats.
Four quadrants sit side by side: Strengths and Opportunities carried straight over from SWOT, Weaknesses and Threats swapped out for Aspirations and Results.
Reach for this when…
- SWOT sessions have turned into a list of complaints and nobody leaves energised.
- You need people to commit to a stretch goal, not just diagnose the current state.
- The team already knows its weaknesses; what's missing is a shared aspiration.
How to run it
- Ask what the organisation does well and where it has real strength.
- Ask where the opportunities are in the market or the moment.
- Ask what the organisation aspires to become, stated as a shared ambition.
- Ask what results would prove you got there, in measurable terms.
- Build the strategy from the answers, not from a separate weaknesses list.
A worked example
Situation. Valentina Gómez runs Gómez Muebles, a family furniture workshop in Córdoba, Argentina, whose last strategy session under SWOT spent two hours on ageing machinery and a shrinking domestic market and produced no plan.
Applied. She ran a SOAR session instead, starting with the craftsmanship the workshop was known for and the export interest two customers had already raised unprompted.
Result. The team left with a shared aspiration, to become the region's export furniture maker within three years, and three measurable results to chase in year one, instead of another list of what was wrong.
The catch
SOAR can dodge real problems that a SWOT would have surfaced - an ageing workforce or a cash squeeze doesn't go away because you didn't name it. It works best alongside honest operational reporting, not instead of it. And 'aspirations' can drift into wishful thinking if nobody pressure-tests them against resources.
If the aspiration doesn't survive being asked 'with what budget and by whom', it's a slogan, not a strategy.
Origin: Stavros, Cooperrider & Kelley (2003); developed further by Stavros & Hinrichs, The Thin Book of SOAR (2009)