22nd April 2021. Religion | SWOT
The decline of American church; Getting beyond SWOT
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#1: The decline of American religion
The American education futurist Bryan Alexander has a post on the decline of church membership in the United States—now, at 47%, below half for the first time.
The data are from Gallup, and they show a fairly steep fall over the last 20 years, given that this is relatively slow-moving social data In 1999 the figure was 70%.
There is a decline in every age cohort, as Gallup report notes:
The two major trends driving the drop in church membership — more adults with no religious preference and falling rates of church membership among people who do have a religion — are apparent in each of the generations over time. Since the turn of the century, there has been a near doubling in the percentage of traditionalists (from 4% to 7%), baby boomers (from 7% to 13%) and Gen Xers (11% to 20%) with no religious affiliation.
What’s also striking is that no matter how you split the data—whether by party affiliation, level of education, ethnicity, geography—every single category shows a decline over the last 20 years, and none of them trivial. Alexander speculates that:
As I’ve said before, the trend could point to the long-predicted secularization of the United States, way behind other peer nations. That can suggest a reduction in religious influence across the board, from politics to popular culture and mores.
To be sure, even at 47% these are big numbers, certainly in the richer world. The United States is an outlier in global terms in terms of the level of religious identity. It’s also unique in that there is not an established church; religious identity is fragmented. And it’s unusual in that church organisations play a significant role in filling in for many of the gaps in provision that would in other countries be provided by the state. Alexander quotes the Washington Post on this last point:
(if) in the next 30 years, the United States will not have one dominant religion. “We have to start thinking about what the world looks like in terms of politics, policy, social service,” Ryan Burge said. “How do we feed the hungry, clothe the naked when Christians are half of what it was. Who picks up the slack, especially if the government isn’t going to?”
The distinguished management academic Roger Martin has used his Medium pages to take a shot at the SWOT analysis—that tired old management review device which reviews strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. When I say take a shot at, he’s more blasted the thing out of the ground:
When I give a strategy talk, I often ask the audience: Who here has either performed or received a SWOT analysis? Virtually all members of every audience put up their hands because SWOT is such a prominent tool that everyone has both performed and reviewed numerous SWOT analyses. I then ask: Who can tell me a blinding insight that came out of any such SWOT analysis? I am still waiting for my first hand on that second question. Not one single audience member has raised his or her hand to tell me of a decisive insight from a SWOT analysis.
I don’t disagree with this—I’ve worked for managers who did a SWOT review every six months and I’m not sure it improved performance. Martin traces the history back to the 1950s, when ‘planning’ was king. It seems that the tool was taught at Harvard Business School and popularised as a consulting tool by SRI.
But here’s the thing. Yes, the SWOT itself is not a great tool—it’s a snapshot, and you’re using it to try to identify your dynamic response to your changing environment.
Yet it does allow people to structure their thinking about what their capabilities are (that’s the strengths and weaknesses part) and also what’s happening in their external environment (that’s the opportunities and threats).
And as it happens, there’s a simple tweak that allows a SWOT analysis to be used as a platform for this dynamic analysis: the TOWS, or double-SWOT, where you create a quick set of 2x2s based on the combinations of your capabilities and your external environment. So S gets combined in turn with O and T, and W in turn with O and T.
I’ve used this a lot with clients who need to be able to create a structured and strategic conversation in an organisation, and don’t have much time. Contrary to Martin’s classroom finding, this version has always produced insights.
Martin talks about the problem about assessing strengths is that you need to know what you are assessing them against. But using SWOT as part of a double-SWOT analysis is actually turning it into a dialogue tool.
And the double-SWOT effectively creates a dialogue about a range of distinctive possible futures in which strategic choices can emerge quite quickly. In the face of this, people can (and do) revisit their strengths and weaknesses.
And yes: sometimes the double-SWOT does tell you something everyone in the room knows already—you’re behind the curve on digital, for example. But since half, or more, of effective strategic change is about alignment, just having the same conversation in the room is often a big step forwards.
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