Thinking About SWOTS

A friend of mine made a comment the other day about how another person at his work didn't understand how to participate in a SWOT analysis.

And it got me thinking about it for a minute.

I'm all for examining my strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats, but what struck me was the word "understand" when he talked about the HR benchmarking analysis. But how much do both the one giving and the one receiving the analysis understand of each others contextual objectivity in the process?

Objectivity when it comes to measuring production output is pretty straightforward, but measuring psychological and character metrics seems like... well I think it's pretty tough to do in context.

One of the companies we're interested in doing business with has a list of ten principles they operate by that we admire a lot, and one of them is a very old axiom:

"Seek first to understand, then to be understood"

How often, when we are judging what may be fairly subjective metrics, do we *not* seek to understand or even consider the other persons actions we're about to judge within context?

I can certainly look at my own history and see places where the same work was being produced in different contextual settings, and one place, I excelled at. The other place, I didn't do well at all. Was it a weakness of my own character, or a conflict inherent to the context that prevented excellence?

When the day comes we have to do annual reviews and analysis, we'll work hard to understand first.