NOISE ANALYSIS AN ALTERNATIVE TO SWOT STRATEGIC PLANNING

Having a solid strategic plan will allow your company and team to flourish. You must have a format & process that is effective. NOISE analysis is that format.

Contact Mike to schedule a strategic planning meeting that will deliver results and engaged staff that are part-of the plan.

NOISE ANALYSIS

Working with companies developing strategic plans everyone seems to feel that the default method is a SWOT analysis strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats.  I’ve never been a fan and wondered if there was an alternative.

In the ‘High Performance Team Building’ class a smart friend Brian Pagkos shared an idea ‘SNOT Analysis’ strengths, needs, opportunities, threats.

While preparing for a focus group meeting it came to me NOISE

• Needs
• Opportunities
• Improvements
• Strengths
• Exceptions

A method that uses solution-focused language and is able to build upon the teams existing knowledge and goals.

OBJECTIVE

• When planning, determining what we want to have happen & understanding the road-blocks are necessary. Developing knowledge plus skills to navigate the plan allows us to choose focus points & what to eliminate. The NOISE analysis is a planning technique of looking at what is working and determining areas to improve. It gives us a format to explore opportunities that we may know about or be missing. When we understand the NOISE conditions, we can create a path towards the future that allows the company or team or project to flourish.

MATERIALS

• Flip Chart Paper
• Markers
• Lots of Post-it Notes

GROUP SIZE

• 5 to 20
• I’ve led this with larger teams you can break the group into teams of 6 or less. Each team of 6 works independently then get together to share (or the facilitator finds commonalities & categorizes them) OR lead a series of focus groups with smaller teams separately.

TIME FRAME

• At least 3 hours, I have led this over multiple days.

GUIDELINES

1. Before the meeting it may prove helpful to decide on a goal (what-by-when) to be achieved or to send some pre-work to the participants for then to think about. Examples of pre-work:

• Share these 8 Planning Questions and ask them to come prepared to share some responses.
• Have them work through the question of ‘What is your department accountable for? how can others help you in accomplishing your accountability?’ and come prepared for each department to share their responses.

2. On a piece of flip chart paper draw a circle in the middle. Create four quadrants radiating from the center circle. See below.

While drawing the NOISE analysis chart explain what would be useful information in each area. Feel free to change the bullets to better match your needs.

 

EXCEPTIONS

In the center circle write “Exceptions”

• Of the N, O & I Listed what is already happening, even just a little bit?

STRENGTHS

In the upper left quadrant write “Strengths”

• What is working well?
• What evidence do you have that these strengths exist?
• What does your team/dept excel at?
• What do others say is your team/ dept strengths?

*

NEEDS

In the upper right quadrant write “Needs”

• When we have ______ this will be a better place to work, or we would be more effective in completing our work.
• What does the team or department need to do its work better?
• What do you need or the individuals within the department need to do the work better?
• What do you need that you do not have to complete your work?

*

OPPORTUNITIES

In the lower left quadrant write “Opportunities”

• Other departments/ locations/ companies/ etc… are doing _________ we ought to consider what they are doing.
• An area of untapped talent or underutilized resources is __________
• What do we currently have that could be used differently?

*

IMPROVEMENTS

In the lower right quadrant write “Improvements”

1. What small concrete improvements can we as a team/ dept complete in the next 90 days?
2. Based on our strengths, needs, & opportunities what areas can we improve?
3. What is already working well that we can make work better?
4. A consistent area of improvement I hear people wish for is ____________
5. One area of improvement that would support our capacity/ growth is ____________

• Miracle Question: You leave here today & go to sleep. While you are sleeping a miracle happens and what you need in order to be more effective with your work happens, but you don’t know because you were asleep. You arrive tomorrow what is the 1st thing you would notice that makes you realize this has happened? How would you know?
• Scaling Question: Currently the department, organization, team (choose appropriate) operates at X, what does X + 2 look like?
• 1—2—3—4—5—6—7—8—9—10

3.  After illustrating + sharing the format with the group ask them to grab some flipchart papers, markers and post-it notes. Take about 45 minutes to 1 hour as a team to complete as many responses to the NOISE analysis as possible. PLEASE ask people to just share, this is a brainstorming-planning time we will evaluate the ideas later; for right now we are looking for quantity.

3a.  If you feel people will be be too judgmental.

• Ask them to work individually for about 10 minutes (more or less) filling out post-it notes by themselves on each of the areas. Start with Strengths then progress to Needs,Opportunities, Improvements, and end with Exceptions.
• After people have had a chance to think and work by themselves, ask them to share their responses (post-it notes) on the NOISE areas.

4.  With the team go through the NOISE areas. Starting with Strengths sort the ideas in affinity common groups, finding clusters of ideas that may fit together. Take the ideas that may be outliers and also recognize those ideas they may be breakthrough ideas.

At this stage the smaller teams of 6 or less are necessary this way any confusion over the ideas can be explained by the person that had the idea. Plus the team is small enough to discuss what belongs together and what may be outliers.

Repeat the process in each of the other NOISE areas in this order: Needs, Opportunities,Improvements, and end with Exceptions.

5.  Once you are done sorting & clustering into common groups, the team will look for broad categories for each small cluster. For example ‘Communication between sales and production’ or ‘More knowledge of how to use our internal knowledge management system’.  As the group reaches agreement on the broad categories re-write these in the proper NOISE areas.

6.  Now that everyone feels comfortable with the broad categories re-write them in each NOISE area and ask the team to dot vote on which they feel are most relevant based upon the purposes of our planning time.

7.  We have broad categories and a bunch of ideas on how to focus and improve them…Next steps would be to take the broad categories and ask the team to develop some short term measurement / milestones to show progress and achievement in the categories.

8.  Management (or the team leader) gathers all the broad categories and short team measurements / milestones for achievement and types them up in a ‘Plan Document’shares them with the team, ensures that they are all in agreement.

9.  Any feedback is taken into consideration and changes are made as needed. This Plan Document along with all the great ideas is now your improvement or strategic plan.

10. Routinely return back to the Plan Document and check for relevancy & success, plan to deal with + correct set-backs.

 

WHAT DO YOU THINK?

How can you see the NOISE analysis working for your next strategic planning meeting?