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External Strategic Assessments: Our Opportunities

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Karns show hikers the path in the absence of landmarks. Like analyzing opportunities, karns provide possible paths to achieve your objectives.
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Assessing potential opportunities is the first of two external assessments in the strategic assessment process. The reason for having a strategic plan is to allow everyone in the organization to focus on the most important things that help achieve the mission and vision. There are lots of shiny objects to chase. Only a few moves you in the direction you want to go. Avoid Shiny Object Syndrome by assessing available opportunities early in the strategic planning process. This helps organizational leaders identify which opportunities to pursue, which ones to leave behind, and create peace with those choices.

When I first became an Executive Director of a small nonprofit several years ago, I expected to be given a list of priorities to pursue. The direction I was given from the Board Chair was, “Go down there and take charge. I’m sick of hearing about all the problems!” The only direction I could find from reading Board minutes was to move the organization to national accreditation. I recognized this void of strategic direction as an opportunity to meet recognized industry standards, and improve the way we worked. There were lots of directions I could have led the organization, so knowing this goal was important. Accreditation provided a clear framework, allowed me to ignore those shiny distractions, and recognize real opportunities. While not a formal strategic plan, accreditation was our strategic goal. Opportunities are everywhere, but they are not all created equal. Knowing which ones help achieve organizational goals is important for success.

While you may find hundreds of opportunities during your strategic assessment, think about where those opportunities begin.
-Photo by Gerard Vila on Pexels.com

Sources of opportunities

During this assessment, look everywhere for opportunities. Remember, as you develop your strategic plan, opportunities will present themselves in the future you cannot even foresee today. Many of the jobs today didn’t even exist a generation ago. Capture those opportunities that are easy to see and also stretch yours and other’s imaginations about opportunities you can create or may exist in the future.

When Bill Bratton became Police Commissioner for New York City, he created a system to identify crime hot spots and focus police efforts in those areas (yes, eventually COMPSTAT became synonymous with racial profiling, but Bratton began the program looking at crime data and patterns, not race. He worked with marginalized populations because they were the most affected by crime). The impact COMPSTAT had in reducing crime in NYC caused the trend of violent crime across the nation to decrease. When he became Commissioner, he promised to reduce crime. He found his opportunity in instant crime data, something that really did not exist at that time. He created his opportunity.

In his book, Good To Great, Jim Collins talks about three areas organizations can mine for opportunities. The first area is identifying what things your organization does that are great. Next, identify passions of the organization. Finally look at the activities that provide your operating revenue.

How to narrow opportunities

If you lead discussions about opportunities well, you will find you have far more opportunities than ability to follow. Collins discusses examples of companies redefining themselves broadly or more narrowly. Use the opportunities you identified in the three areas exercise, create a Venn diagram, one circle for each area. The opportunities that overlap are likely keys to achieving your organizational values, vision for changing the world, and achieving your strategic goals. The opportunities that are common to each of the three circles is the starting point for developing your strategic opportunities and goals.

Narrowing down your opportunities to a a strategic few helps everyone focus on the most important things to achieve success.
-Photo by Ethan Sees on Pexels.com

Refine your opportunities to match current or future strengths. As you look at opportunities for the future, identify strengths are you lacking and how you will fill those need. Identify the current strengths you do have to leverage, acquiring those you need. As you match strengths to opportunities, find those that create synergy. Synergistic connections excite your client base, your employees, and your investors.

Narrowing the field of opportunities is important because chasing too many, causes the organization and the people in it to lose focus. Depending on the length of your timeline, you should limit your strategic goals, based on opportunities, to one to five. More than five, and everything seems important. When everything is important, then there is no focus on what actions, tasks, purchases, training, hiring, and similar activity has the priority. You end up chasing every shiny object and fail to make progress on any of your goals. One big goal that is achieved, is better than five super sized goals that never become reality.

Narrowing down your opportunities to a strategic few helps everyone focus on the most important things to achieve success.

Review

Identifying opportunities is one half of an external assessment in a strategic evaluation. In this process, examine lots of opportunities. Use the model of your passions, greatest qualities, and revenue drivers to list opportunities. Narrow your list by finding common opportunities in each of the three areas. One to five opportunities are ideal to pursue. These become your strategic goals. Failing to focus on only a very few opportunities causes people in the organization to be confused about priorities. Not every opportunity is right for your organization. What you will find, with disciplined focus and priorities, is you will easily recognize strategic opportunities that emerge along your path and propel you forward, passing shiny objects become easier. Successfully completing this part of your strategic assessment improves focus and success.

References

Good to Great

Flawed

Turnaround

Roger Williams University Executive Development Seminar

Strategic Assessments: Find and Leverage Your Strengths

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Over the years, I have participated in a number of leadership assessments. Almost all emphasize the importance of leading from strength. Leaders are taught to find other people or to implement systems to compensate for weaknesses. It is appropriate that strengths are the first thing to be assessed as an organization begins planning for the future. Strengths are internal factors that help achieve success. Strategic planners begin by identifying sources of data. Determine what areas of your organization you seek to examine to find your strengths. Identify measures of strengths. Understand why leading from strength is important. When leaders complete this exercise, they will be in a better place to figure were the organization should head in the future.

image of three chisels resting on a strop.
Chisels are great tools for trimming and paring wood. Their strength is at the tip where the two planes meet creating a sharp edge. Chilsels make poor clamps.
-Photo by author

GEN (R) Wesley Clark said, “I’ve never met an effective leader who wasn’t aware of his talents and working to sharpen them.” (Rath, T. & Conchie, B.). Think about the leading edge of a chisel. A woodworker doesn’t try to cut wood with the sides of the chisel. With enough force, one could certainly cut wood with the side of a chisel, but its strength comes at the leading edge, where the user carefully refines the two planes that intersect at the tip into a fine edge. A well sharpened chisel will cut most wood with simple hand pressure. While it is possible to build furniture with only a chisel, saws, planes, and clamps help the chisel be part of a team of tools that can build many things easily. It cannot hold well. Long cuts are better performed by a saw. Flattening is ideal for the plane. When it comes to trimming away wood from tenons, refining saw cuts, and creating mortises for joints the strength of the chisel’s sharp tip, make it the perfect tool. The chisel is an ancient tool, yet still occupies space in almost every modern wood shop because of its strengths. Like knowing the strengths of your tools, knowing the strengths of you and your organization helps you and other leaders identify your future based on your strengths.

Organizations often begin assessing strengths by asking only the invited planners what they view their strengths to be. Doing that is like asking an employee to write his or her own annual evaluation! Plan time to invite observations of others such as

  • Employees
  • Customers
  • Stockholders
  • Community members where you have facilities
  • Vendors, and
  • Peers.

Each of these groups sees your organization differently. They may see things as strengths you do not recognize yet are very important to your current level of success. Collect these observations as you analyze where your strengths are.

Organizations work in many different areas. I ran a small nonprofit for several years. One of the things I missed from my time in the military was easy access to legal advice. I had two lawyers whose job was to keep the command team out of trouble by vetting their ideas and orders. There were a number of times, in my nonprofit, I worried that there were legal issues I was not aware of in our operations.

Other areas to think about include

  • Operations
  • Human Resources
  • Internal and external communications
  • Industry trends and how your strengths remain relevant
  • Quality controls
  • Leadership now and moving forward
  • Employee education, and
  • Safety

This list could be longer. Adapt it to your organization and your needs. The list should be similar whether your organization is a team of engineers in the automotive industry, or a small nonprofit medical clinic in a remote community. The details however will be different.

As you work through this process, you may notice areas you expected to find as strengths are really weaknesses. Note that, but do not focus on those weaknesses now. Return to them when you get to the part on evaluating your weaknesses.

For example, you recognize in operations, you are the best widget maker in the world. As you analyze your leadership and employee education, you realize your leaders are all older. You have done little to develop the next generation of leaders. Without strong leaders in the future, your organization risks losing the top spot as widget manufacturer. You can say, “Hey, we are working on strengths in this exercise.”, and ignore what you just learned. Instead, not that weakness and evaluate it in the next step.

Anyone can pick up a ruler and tell you the length of an object. The question is what does the length matter? Measuring strengths can be difficult. For example, in the length example, are you measuring in millimeters or inches? Having a common language about the things you measure helps everyone understand the significance of the thing being measured.

photo of the Mars Climate Orbiter
-Using the same units of measure helps leaders develop a common understanding of strengths shown in data. The consequences of using a common means of measurement result in failure.
-NASA Photo

There are a number of ways to measure strengths. Data will play an important role in this respect. Everyone needs to agree on what to measure and what appropriate units of measure are. In 1999, NASA crashed a $125 million weather orbiter into Mars because some engineers uses imperial units rather than metric. It is important that everyone uses the same units of measure as you analyze your strengths.

Organizations use several common means of measuring strengths. Use the scope of your activity to measure ROI, stakeholder satisfaction, staff retention, and other measures. Determine how well is your organization achieving goals. Identify how well your organization uses it guiding principles to accomplish its mission and vision.

The US. Army evaluates leaders in a number of areas. One is how many Soldiers pass an annual fitness test. War is hard work. The Army knows Soldiers must be fit regardless of their job to fit and win our nation’s wars. Use this example as a way to identify what you should measure and what metrics actually identify strengths.

Your organization’s strengths are like the sharp edge of a woodworker’s chisel. Strengths help you cut through resistance and achieve your organization’s mission. As you develop your vision of the future, identifying and analyzing strengths help your organization determine how to apply them to the challenges you face. Strengths are internal factors you control. Data helps identify strengths. Use a common means of measuring so you have universal understanding. Examining strengths is the first step with the SWOTAR model and need to be used with the next step, examining weaknesses. Look for that post next month.

References

– (ND) Some famous unit conversion errors. (PDF) National Aeronautics and Space Administration. https://spacemath.gsfc.nasa.gov/weekly/6Page53.pdf. Retrieved February 28, 2025

Chimonyo, Y. (2024). Organizational effectiveness: A guide to assessing organizational effectiveness. The Human Capital Hub.https://www.thehumancapitalhub.com/articles/organizational-effectiveness-a-guide-to-assessing-organizational-effectiveness- Retrieved February 27, 2025

Kinicki, A. & Williams, B. (2008). Management; A practical introduction. (3d Ed.). McGraw Hill Irwin. New York, NY.

Morreale, S (October 21, 2009). Executive Strategic Thinking. [Training Presentation] Command Training Series: Executive Development Course. New England Association of Chiefs of Police. Held at Roger Williams University, Bristol, RI

Rath, T, & Conchie B. (2008) Strengths based leadership; Great leaders, teams and why people follow. Gallop Press. New York, NY.

(c) 2025 Christopher St. Cyr