I laughed out loud. A Commercial Excellence Director showed me the company’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats (SWOT) analysis. As with every other company I’ve studied or advised, it was a neat, four-box figure. “How useful do you find it?” I asked. “We call it the Silly Waste of Time, but it’s in the template,” he said. And from the ripple around the room, the whole team clearly thought the SWOT analysis was of no practical use.

So here we had a team of clever, busy people spending significant time on an activity they knew to be useless. And this team and this technique were not unusual. Many marketing teams talk about the ‘charade’ of the annual planning process. How much of our data analysis tells us something really useful? How many patient journey maps make a difference to what we do? Does the brand’s value proposition just state the obvious? The reality of corporate life is that much of it is ritualistic, like a rain dance, doing things because that’s the way we do things around here, but we’ve forgotten quite why we do it. This has huge direct and opportunity costs. Just think what you could achieve if you spent that time and effort usefully. If we could understand the reason busy, bright people do obviously useless things, we might stand a chance of improving the situation. As usual in this column, let’s turn to evolutionary science for the answer.

Anthropologists have long known that humans don’t just imitate what others do, we imitate how it’s done, even the useless parts. If we admire a firm’s excellent launch execution, we copy their useful cross-functional alignment meetings, but also their useless pre-meeting meetings and overly large invitee lists. The anthropological explanation for over-imitation is that the functionally useless actions transmit norms, signal group membership and maintain cultural cohesion. Over-imitation is a cultural universal, like marriage and music, seen in every society. If something is culturally universal, you can be sure that it is deeply imbedded in human behaviour. And once you appreciate that, it helps you tweak what you do to make it more useful.

Two things are true about corporate rituals. First, they began because they once had some practical value. Second, they still have social value, oiling the way the team works together. Together, this means that abandoning the ritual might have negative, unintended consequences. It also means that if you can understand its original purpose, you can adapt it to make it useful again. My client’s useless SWOT is a good example. By retaining it, they signalled they were professional strategists, adhering to norms and being rigorous. That’s useful. And, if you understand that its original aim of SWOT was to tailor strategies to the firm’s situation, you can adapt your SWOT process to achieve that original goal. I’ve seen this done in my research and the way SWOT is adapted in the best firms is a good example of turning a useless ritual into a useful process.

Strategy geeks like me trace SWOT way back to Stanford Research Institute in the 1960s and, later, Heinz Weihrich’s TOWS matrix in 1982. They would shudder at the way it’s been corrupted into a useless four-box list. The original designers of SWOT said it must do three things. First, SWOT doesn’t stand alone, it follows all other analyses, using their outputs as its inputs. Second, those inputs must be validated as objectively valid and true; they can’t be opinions. Third, strengths must be aligned to opportunities and weaknesses to threats, thereby revealing what the strategy must do to be successful. If you look at the SWOT in most pharma and medtech firms, you will see they don’t do these three things. But these are the useful part of SWOT. The four-box matrix, filled with vague opinions, is just ritualistic and a Silly Waste of Time. If you would like to know more about this, I can send you my longer article, ‘Competing on Alignment’. Just ask.