Ever run a planning session that starts with a whiteboard full of everything that's wrong? There's a better way. SOAR is a strengths-based planning framework that swaps "what's broken" for "what's working" — and it changes the whole energy in the room. In this post we break down why SWOT isn't wrong, just tired, and how four simple questions can get your team building instead of defending. Read it, steal the questions, watch what happens.
Somewhere in your organisation there is a plan with your name on it. You have read it once. You could not recite it now. Most leaders carry two plans: the one they wrote and the one they run. Only one of them was ever designed, and it was not the one that decides what happens on Tuesday. How to edit a plan until it is yours, what has to survive the edit, and the three rhythms that stop it going quiet.
Find your team's plan and work out when somebody last looked at it. For most teams the answer sits between six weeks ago and never, and the plan itself is rarely the problem. Nobody abandoned it. It stopped being mentioned, and then it stopped being true. Here is the two-question test that tells you which of four states your plan is in, and the three habits that bring it back.
