The Blog

Just spent a couple of days at the Performing Arts Forum in Belfast. A really interesting, provocative, entertaining and fun couple of days (everything the performing arts are if you think about it) – so congratulations to the team at PAF, to the curators Ruth McGowan and Alice Malseed, the panellists, the moderators, the contributors and the wonderful performers.

A high point for me was the Long Table session facilitated by Dr. Ali FitzGibbon of Queens University. The Long Table approach was new to me, and – if you haven’t experienced it in action – check it out!

The session was designed to explore where the performing arts sector is at, six years on from the COVID pandemic. “What were the positive changes that emerged? What challenges are still with us? What is the learning with hindsight from such a critical time for performing arts?”

The contributions were honest, emotional, rigorous and various. There was one thing that captured my attention. The number of times people said that they felt “visible” during the pandemic. It felt like suddenly everybody was talking about artists, money seemed to increase into the sector, opportunities opened, people had access to space and resources they hadn’t had before. For a brief period they were “seen”. But that visibility seemed to evaporate once everything “got back to normal”.

I was surprised by the depth of emotion around this experience. And as I reflected on the previous days panel discussions and listened to the second day’s discussions I kept hearing the experience of being invisible in almost every discussion. If an experience is that pervasive then it must be systemic in some way and that’s when the the very obvious penny dropped with a very very loud clatter.

Pick up the Arts Act (any version of it), or pick up the National Cultural Policy, or any creative industries plan, or pick up a Local Area Development Plan, or Tourism Plan or any of these kinds of documents and you will find endless mentions of The Arts (and/or Creativity) , and marvellous claims for the impact and social and economic values of “The Arts” but you will not find – from the Arts Act down – any systematic mention or consideration of the labour force required to create “The Arts” – not just the artists but the managers, the administrators, the technicians, nobody gets a mention. You could be forgiven for thinking that “The Arts” arrive as if by magic.

If the people who make and sustain the “The Arts” are invisible within the framework of National Policy – from the founding legislation down – then “The Arts” can be seen as “naturally occurring”. Any “naturally occurring” phenomenon of value (land, water, air, oil, minerals, care) will be exploited. If a labour force is essentially invisible in policy and legislation then it has neither rights nor price.

That invisibility allows politicians and policy mandarins to talk about a sector that generates billions of euro in economic value without really concerning themselves with the economic welfare of the people who make and maintain that value.

It is this very invisibility that allows policy to talk about “subsidy” and not “investment”, that allows for subsidy to ignore inflation, that thinks that the welfare of the labour force is best served by a non index linked lottery scheme, that struggles to understand low income/poverty/precarity as anything other than a personal failing/responsibility. It is this invisibility that allows funding to be treated as a tenner slipped into your hand by a relative at a birthday; it is this invisibility that sparks angry outbursts from politicians who fundamentally are outraged that you’re not grateful for the tenner.

Travelling back in the train I thought that if there was one necessary action to emerge then it is to return the labour force to the legislation, and don’t do it as an afterthought, tucked into a welfare clause, but as the founding premise. Name the workers – not as beneficiaries of “subsidy”, as grateful recipients of the tenner – but as the people without whom there is no arts sector to speak of, fund, or take credit for.

Once that is done then any policy that does not have a labour force plan, a plan that is fully costed and funded, a plan that acknowledges worker rights alongside cultural rights and values, that treats precarity and poverty as a design failure and not a personal one, that indexes support to the real cost of a working life in the arts will be recognised for what it is: not an arts (or cultural policy) but a property policy. Something designed to manage and exploit a “naturally occurring resource”; a policy that does not see people. A policy not worthy of consideration.

That’s the work.

The Basic Income for Artists has already proved its value according to all government reports. More importantly it’s stopped behaving like a “pilot scheme” and started behaving like essential infrastructure.

People have planned their lives around it. They’ve worked more, not less, taken risks they couldn’t take before, some people have even secured mortgages!

For many of the 2000 people about to come off the scheme in the next week or so all of these developments are in danger and that truly is a tragedy of planning.

According to this government the Basic Income kicks off again in September 2026. But do we just rinse and repeat, or do we take the opportunity to plan for permanence? Are we are willing to finish the job?

What if the next challenge was resolving the design flaws: The Basic Income looks like a grant, is treated like income, and is governed as an exception.

This confusion is the main weakness of the scheme. Coupled with that, because it sits outside the social protection system:
• it interacts badly with welfare supports,
• it creates uncertainty around illness, housing, and life events,
• and it remains politically fragile, vulnerable to reframing as discretionary spending, and dependent on arbitrary political will.

What if the big challenge is understanding that this is a Basic Income Policy, not an Arts Policy. In truth, none of this is about the arts and we need to stop talking about it in the exceptional language of arts policy. Basic Income is about where income supports belong.

Surely, if something provides income security, it belongs in the income security system.

“Grants” fund activity. Income supports secure people. BIA is built on a grant logic trying to solve income problems, the state makes this mistake quite a bit and it never quite works.

Now, the pilot has shown, quietly but decisively, that artistic labour doesn’t fail because of a lack of talent or ambition. It fails because of income volatility. Therefore, if we can reduce the volatility, the rest of the system starts working again.

That underlines the previous point:
Basic Income isn’t an arts intervention. It’s a labour intervention. And that’s worth memorising.

The inevitable next step in this logic: put it where income lives, inside the system that already knows how to do this job.

The social protection system is already set up to:
• support people who work intermittently,
• allow earnings alongside payments,
• manage volatility through taxation and annual assessment,
• and provide continuity across illness, care, and ageing.

Arguably the Back to Work Enterprise Allowance is an early version of the Basic Income Scheme.

Keeping the Basic Income outside that system is no longer neutral. It actively undermines the scheme (as all the people who discovered they were losing their disability benefits will tell you)

Integration isn’t radical. It’s administrative common sense.

It’s important to remember that the welfare system already allows people to work, earn, and receive income supports at the same time. (What it doesn’t handle well is pretending income is a grant).

Once earnings are treated normally – taxed annually, assessed over time rather than week-by-week – the problems disappear. People work more when the cliff edges are removed. We already know this.

There’s a real temptation to think of the next phase as a fight: more funding, more cohorts, more advocacy. But the real task is far more tedious.

What if the next stage of BIA is:
• turning the pilot into a statutory payment, protected by legislation
• moving from discretion to legal entitlement,
• shifting from being exceptional to being protected in a larger system.

If we accept that the Basic Income belongs in social protection, something else becomes clear: artists are not a special case. They are just an early one.

Artists labour reveal what happens when work is intermittent, value is long-term, and income doesn’t arrive neatly every Friday. And that’s no longer unusual. It’s increasingly normal.

The Basic Income doesn’t need defending as an arts policy. It needs finishing as a labour and welfare policy. All it needs is some political will, and a few legislative tweaks and we can have the system the international press currently and mistakenly thinks we have.

And finishing it means putting it where it was always heading anyway..

And just for the record even 8000 artists (four times the current cohort) would account for approximately only 0.48% of the 2026 Department of Social Protection budget. Less than half of one percent. Mull that over for a second.

There is a polite fiction at the heart of Irish public debate about arts funding: that the arts are somehow exceptional in their dependence on the state. That they require “subsidy”, while other sectors thrive on the market. This is simply not true. In reality, everything is state funded – either visibly through direct expenditure, or invisibly through the tax system. The difference is not whether the state intervenes, but which sectors are allowed to call that intervention “normal economic policy”.

Once this fiction is abandoned, the question of arts investment changes completely. The issue is no longer whether the arts deserve public money, but why the state persistently refuses to apply the same policy instruments to culture that it routinely applies to, for example, industry, property and finance.

The hidden state: tax expenditures as public spending

The Department of Finance is quite explicit on this point: tax expenditures are public spending delivered through the tax system. They are not marginal tweaks; they are fiscal decisions with real opportunity costs. Based on a preliminary search in 2024, tax expenditures in Ireland amounted to approximately €8 billion – roughly 2% of national income and around 8% of total tax revenue. That figure alone should end any claim that Ireland is a low-intervention state.

Crucially, these supports are highly concentrated. Roughly 70% of all tax expenditures are accounted for by just ten measures. The single largest is the R&D tax credit, with revenue foregone of approximately €1.4 billion per annum (this mostly benefits the multi-national sector) This is not an incidental policy choice; it is a deliberate and ongoing act of industrial strategy.

What makes tax expenditures politically convenient is precisely what makes them democratically fragile: they are less visible, less scrutinised, and less debated than voted spending. They rarely appear in annual budget narratives as “expenditure”, even though that is exactly what they are. The section 481 film tax credit is essentially a check written by Revenue to a small cohort of producers. When the state backs industry through the tax code, it is described as competitiveness. When it backs housing, it is described as market support. When it backs finance, it is described as stability. When the arts seek funding, it is described as subsidy.

This “asymmetry” is not economic. It is ideological. It is funding used as power and control.

Industrial policy is not controversial—unless it’s cultural.

Ireland already runs an extensive and unapologetic industrial policy. Direct state aid through agencies such as IDA Ireland and Enterprise Ireland includes grant support, equity participation, capital funding and risk-sharing instruments. IDA alone operates an annual grant programme in the region of €100 million, while Enterprise Ireland administers large-scale venture and seed capital schemes, including a €250 million state-backed fund.

At EU level, this approach is entirely orthodox. The European Commission’s State Aid Scoreboard shows that tax advantages, grants and guarantees are standard instruments across Member States, with the overwhelming majority of aid explicitly directed towards agreed policy priorities. State aid is not an anomaly; it is the machinery of modern government.

What is striking is not that the state intervenes so heavily in the economy—but that culture is persistently excluded from this logic, treated instead as a discretionary add-on, funded primarily through small, contested, and hyper-visible budget lines.

Property, finance and the myth of the “free market”

Housing policy provides the clearest illustration of how deeply the state already shapes markets through fiscal means. Measures such as Help to Buy, rent tax credits, and mortgage-related reliefs are not neutral interventions. They actively structure demand, prices and investment behaviour. Whether one agrees with their effects or not is beside the point. The key insight is this: the tax system is already being used as a primary policy lever in the property market.

Similarly, finance and pensions are underpinned by extensive tax reliefs that primarily benefit those with sufficient income or assets to avail of them. These are rarely framed as subsidies, despite their scale and distributive impact. They are treated as part of the natural order of the economy.

Against this backdrop, claims that the arts represent a special burden on the public purse are not just weak—they are intellectually dishonest.

The arts problem is not “too much subsidy”, but the wrong instruments

The arts in Ireland are already state funded – but badly. Funding is fragmented, short-term, risk-averse, and overly focused on individual artists rather than sectoral capacity. It relies almost entirely on direct grants, which are politically exposed and administratively over-burdened. Meanwhile, the state withholds the very instruments it routinely uses elsewhere: tax credits, capital allowances, investment reliefs, and demand-side incentives.

This produces predictable outcomes:

chronic under-investment in production, touring and presentation;

weak organisational balance sheets;

loss of technical and producing skills;

over-reliance on individual precarity masked as “artistic freedom”.

The result is not a sustainable cultural sector, but a welfare-adjacent ecosystem permanently in crisis mode.

Towards a mixed funding model using standard state tools

The alternative is neither radical nor risky. It is simply policy consistency.

If the state accepts that tax expenditures are legitimate tools for building industrial capacity, then the arts should be supported through a blended model combining increased direct funding with aggressive, well-designed tax incentives. These incentives should not be symbolic or boutique; they should mirror existing instruments in scale, structure and seriousness.

For example, this could include:

Production and touring tax credits, led by venues and presenters, to stabilise employment and regional circulation; Accelerated capital allowances for cultural infrastructure, equipment, accessibility and decarbonisation; Commissioning and workforce “credits” to rebuild the technical and producing middle layers of the sector; Capped cultural investment reliefs to mobilise private capital without creating tax shelters; Demand-side participation credits, targeted to broaden access rather than subsidise elite consumption.

Each of these instruments already exists elsewhere in the system. None requires new ideological ground. All can be capped, sunsetted, evaluated and regionally weighted. What is missing is not technical feasibility, but political imagination.

The real question: what does the state think arts and culture is for?

Ultimately, this is not an argument about “generosity”. It is an argument about what the state believes culture does.

If culture is understood as foundational infrastructure—shaping identity, place, democratic capacity and social resilience—then under-investing in it while lavishly supporting other sectors is not prudent. It is incoherent.

The Irish state already funds the economy everywhere. The only real question is whether it is prepared to admit that culture is part of that economy, and to fund it with the same seriousness, sophistication and confidence it applies elsewhere.

Anything less is not “fiscal realism”, It is , arguably, cultural negligence.

In the previous article it was suggested that art is a form of research – a way of knowing rather than a decorative practice. If this is true then treating it as an “intervention” – as so much contemporary government policy does – is not just inadequate, it is an appalling conceptual error and here’s why.

An intervention assumes a system into which something external is inserted. The very use of the word “intervention” implies that the real work is happening elsewhere, and that art arrives later: to soften, translate, humanise, or communicate outcomes already determined. This framing might be administratively convenient, but it fundamentally misunderstands what art does.

Ways of knowing are not optional extras. They are foundational to the operation of any system.

We do not add mathematics to engineering as an intervention. We do not treat language as an add-on to law. We recognise these as bedrocks: foundations without which the system itself cannot function. If art is a way of knowing – embodied, affective, relational, symbolic – then it occupies the same foundational position. It shapes how meaning is made, how value is recognised, how experience is processed and understood.

Health is a particularly stark example. What could be more cultural than how we are born, how we care for one another, how illness is narrated, how pain is legitimised, how death is ritualised and remembered? These are not marginal concerns sitting alongside “real” clinical work. They are the conditions through which health is lived, understood and enacted.

When artists work in health contexts, they are not providing enrichment. They are engaging – we could say struggling – with the cultural substrate of health itself: the stories patients are allowed to tell, the hierarchies of expertise, the emotional economies of care, the tacit rules governing vulnerability and authority. This is not an intervention into health; it is inquiry into what health is.

To position art as additional rather than foundational is therefore to misunderstand both art and the systems it enters. It suggests that culture is a surface layer — something applied after the fact — rather than the medium through which systems operate and become self aware.

This misrecognition is not incidental. It tracks closely with a broader collapse of shared structures of meaning, and with a long-term reduction of artists from shapers of public thought to entertainers, from public intellectuals to purveyors of mood.

As institutional confidence in meaning-making has eroded, art has increasingly been instrumentalised as a balm: something to soothe, distract, cheer up, engage. Artists are asked to lift spirits, increase participation, improve wellbeing scores – worthy goals to be sure (as Captain Jack Sparrow would say) but all profoundly limited. In this framing, art becomes a service industry for emotional regulation, rather than a site of political, philosophical, moral critique, synthesis or discovery.

What is lost in this shift is the recognition of artists as thinkers.

It can be argued that historically artists have been central to how societies metabolise change. They have sensed ruptures before they are named, given form to emerging realities, challenged dominant narratives, and expanded the imaginable. They have both reflected society and helped constitute it. This is the work of public intellectuals, even when it does not arrive in essay form.

The contemporary policy tendency to measure art primarily through outcomes accelerates this diminishing of art. Outcomes privilege clarity, speed and attribution – qualities rarely aligned with deep cultural learning. They reward the legible and the immediate, and they devalue ambiguity, discomfort and delay. In doing so, they push art away from its research function and toward entertainment or therapy.

But complex social systems do not collapse because they lack cheerfulness. They collapse because their ways of knowing become impoverished.

In moments of structural strain – in health systems under pressure, in democracies facing fragmentation, in societies grappling with climate breakdown – the question surely is not how to add art in, but how to restore multiple ways of knowing as legitimate, necessary and interdependent.

Seen this way, artists are not decorating systems or intervening at the margins. They are working at the level of epistemology: expanding what counts as knowledge, whose experience matters, and how understanding is generated and shared.

If we continue to treat art as an addition in policy, we will continue to misunderstand its value. If, however, policy can recognise it as foundational, we are forced to confront a more challenging truth: that learning, care and governance all depend on cultural intelligence — and that artists have been doing this work all along.

Art is not an extra.

It is evidence that the system is still capable of thinking.

I have expressed my scepticism about current government policy towards the Arts elsewhere on several occasions and noted the shift away from art as a real policy concern at a European level. I believe that a turning point has been reached, and it’s time for an honest conversation about the future of arts funding and policy in Ireland.

As somebody once said, I can’t remember who:

“If the answers feel uncomfortable, the questions are probably doing their job.”

The purpose of this blog is to challenge the habits and assumptions that have shaped arts policy and funding for a long time, and hopefully to invite policymakers, artists, and communities to think systemically — not just administratively — about the future of cultural value.

So, 23 questions from my notebook, here we go;

1. What if the real public value of the arts isn’t produced through projects at all, but through the relationships and continuity that make projects possible?

2. When did “supporting artists” become detached from “supporting the places and publics that sustain art”?

3. Why do we keep equating new work with public good?

4. Are we funding great art, or a bureaucratic rhythm of grant rounds?

5. If the Arts Acts speak of interest, knowledge, and standards, why is excellence the word we keep reaching for?

6. What if the purpose of funding is not to reward quality, but to grow capacity for curiosity?

7. Who decided that “artform development” should be the main organising principle of cultural policy?

8. Do artform silos describe how art is made, or simply how it is managed?

9. Has the pursuit of innovation become a substitute for investment in continuity?

10. What would happen if we suspended project funding for three years and invested only in capacity, trust, and experimentation?

11. Who now shapes national cultural policy — the Minister, the Arts Council, or the bureaucracy in between?

12. Why does the Arts Council wait to be requested for advice instead of leading public debate?

13. Has compliance replaced curiosity as the measure of accountability?

14. Is there a national arts strategy at all, or just a rolling series of schemes?

16. Can a body be policy leader, funder, and regulator at once without structural reform?

17. What would it take for the Arts Council to lead policy thinking again, not just administer funding.

18. Why do we still treat “participation” as a by-product when the Arts Acts make it a duty?

19. Are we distributing resources to the best applicants or to the broadest publics?

20. Who is excluded by our current definition of artistic quality?

21. Is “the arts sector” even a useful concept anymore — or do we need a cultural ecosystem frame?

22. What if “access to the arts” became the right to cultural creation?

23. Are we ready to design policy with artists and communities, not just for them?

It’s worth bearing in mind that the Arts Acts were written to “stimulate interest, knowledge and participation in the arts”. But somewhere along the way, we confused administration with strategy..

I’ve written these questions as a provocation to myself as much as anything it’s my hope that some or all of them might reopen a conversation that allows policy to regain some purpose.

I suspect that the answers won’t come from one department or one agency, or any one place, but from our collective honesty about what the system is designed to actually do, and what we really want it to do.

“The Arts has never won the battle on its economic benefits, nor on its social or cultural ones.”

I’m seeing versions of that sentiment everywhere these days. After years of chasing the policies, desperately trying to prove that the arts can fix every social problem, desperately gathering data , devising metrics, and making questionable economic claims all in the hope that we can find the “winning” argument the state of the arts across a lot of the world is precarious. Funding is frozen or declining, promises made are broken, goalposts shifting etc.

For decades we’ve argued that the arts pay their way, that every euro invested spins back two or three times through local economies (depending on which report we look at). Yet the argument never quite lands. The political photo-opportunities increase along with the precarity.

So let’s look at the reasons and assumptions underpinning arts funding to see if we can find a better way.

The fundamental reason the state funds the arts is that there are not enough people with sufficient disposable income to buy a quantity of “art” sufficient to sustain either individual artists or the entire sector. To put it another way a ticket to a show in an arts centre would cost upwards of €200 if the ticket price was not subsidised to ensure more people could afford it. This is what’s known in the trade as a “market failure”.

Now we can have a whole debate as to the why of this market failure (most art is irrelevant to most people, art is elitist etc) but that’s a different conversation. The essential point here is that state funding of the arts makes art affordable to as many people as possible whether they need it or not (the same is true of the army, the police, parks etc. – everybody pays for these things through tax because they are good to have, but not everybody uses them).

In a condition of market failure a method must be found in the short to medium term to inject additional cash into the market to ensure that people and organisations can continue to produce at a price that the wider public can afford. Incidentally a lot of market failure occurs in sectors with a high labour dependence and low productivity, in sectors that depend overwhelmingly on people (Health, education, care, etc)

In the case of the arts in the greater European area the method to correct this market failure has been direct state funding.

However, for that to continue politicians and bureaucrats have to believe in the justifications – the arts create shared experiences, cultural identity, civic health, they create contingent value (the value leaks into other sectors — restaurants, tourism, mental wellbeing., etc etc.) If that belief falters the funding is at risk. We’re witnessing that belief faltering now. It’s important to remember that that the primary reason for state funding, it’s to ensure that everybody can afford it, regardless of whether they want it or not.

Now, if the state pays for something it has to tax it back or it either goes into debt or goes broke. it’s a really simple equation.

So, if we want the State to be the sole source of arts funding and fund the sector effectively, then we also want it to tax more — not just income, but profits, property, and wealth. Because public money only comes from public revenue . Now, personally I think this a simple and brilliant plan – but that’s not the Ireland we live in.

Our low-tax, neo-liberal model means government can’t meet every need — from housing to health — and still raise arts funding to European levels (which, incidentally, are declining).

And so we have a dilemma. The arts sector needs more and more money (because they suffer from cost disease and become more and more expensive over time) but the state won’t tax more to fund its direct spending, so arts funding freezes, is sub-optimal, and declines in real terms.

Now if the primary purpose is to keep the price affordable, how many other ways can we inject money into the system to keep the price affordable. Additional funding has to come from somewhere or the situation will just get worse.

So here’s a few ideas from around the world

I was in Budapest recently and when I paid the hotel bill I was charged a small city tax for staying there. A similar small “tourism levy” here could raise €80–100 million annually for local arts infrastructure and production.

A Cultural Levy on multinationals payable to local authorities could raise €100 per employee (or 0.01% turnover) for local arts funds. The amounts here are so small that opt in could be voluntary and be offset against tax. Lists of those participating could be made public.

Progressive income Tax Credits (the less you earn the more you claim) would allowi ndividuals and SMEs to invest in artists and local arts organisations and reclaim all or part through tax, allowing families and friends to support their own, and small narrow-margin local business to support local arts work.

Commercial Theatre Production Relief, a kind of “Section 481 for stage” that de-risks live performance and encourages ambition.

Professional Artist Income Scheme, a €40k taxable base income that treats artists as workers, not hobbyists. All additional income is aggressively taxed at close to 100% so the scheme simply aggregates lifetime earnings.

Sponsorship. There’s a subtle truth about sponsorship: the arts sector as a whole is very very sponsorable, but individual events and small organisations usually aren’t.

One performance offers too little visibility or duration for a sponsor’s ROI.

But the system — the network of venues, organisations, artists, and communities — is an enduring public brand that business can meaningfully invest in. Working in partnership at local, regional and national level could secure real sponsorship.

Each of these models supports the others – the range of sources de-risks the overall funding model, and the tax incentives crowd in investment, linking those who benefit from culture to those who create it.

This kind of mixed funding ecology isn’t a compromise. It’s probably the only way to build a sustainable cultural economy: public funding as the backbone, private participation and local levies as the real muscle.

In short, well-designed levies and tax incentives can correct market failure — essentially using market tools to achieve public goals. The funny thing is that each of these ideas exist and function effectively in some part of the world, and the funnier thing is that most of them have been deployed here in other economic sectors.

Unfortunately in arts policy thinking in Ireland we fall into a binary: either the State funds culture, or the market does.

The reality is that in an economy like ours both are essential and both have roles to play. Together, they make up an economic cultural ecology – a system that can breathe, flex, and grow.

So, following on from my last post some people have asked for more information on the management/planning tools mentioned. So let’s start by exploring the SWOT.

The SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) is possibly the most popular tool and – in my experience – the least understood. I’ve been handed reports, preliminary strategies, briefing documents, business plans (and cases) all with completed SWOTS or specific calls for conducting a SWOT – and seldom has the potential of the tool been understood or exploited.

So, how to use the SWOT tool.

First: if the SWOT analysis doesn’t end in a series of practical and specific actions it hasn’t been done properly.

Second: like all of these tools it’s simply a way of categorising feelings, data, and other information . It will not identify the feelings, data etc for you.

Third: it’s a relationship tool. It’s a way of capturing and understanding relationships between your organisation and the very specific environment it works in. Practically what this means is that Strengths and Weaknesses are INSIDE your organisation. Opportunities and Threats are OUTSIDE your organisation, in the very specific environment you operate in.

For example, a staff commitment to excellence is internal, and therefore a strength, but an audience with a passion for quality art is external, and therefore an opportunity. A staff indifference to excellence ( or inability to achieve it) is internal and therefore a weakness, and in this instance an audience with a passion for quality art is a threat.

Because the SWOT is a relationship tool (between inside and outside) we have to ask the question “if a strength has no corresponding opportunity, is it actually a strength or just a vanity?” And likewise, if what we perceive as a threat has no corresponding weakness, is it just an anxiety? This matching of threats with weaknesses and strengths with opportunities, allowing us to identify organisational vanities and anxieties is arguably the greatest value in a good SWOT.

Now, you’ve identified all your strengths and matched them against opportunities, and you’ve identified all the threats and matched them against the weaknesses. Fantastic. Now the real work starts: ask what specific actions can you take to exploit the opportunities, to maximise the strengths, to reinforce the weaknesses, and to defend against the threats. A list of practical, SMART, prioritised actions is the final output of a good SWOT analysis. (Such a list should be the output of EVERY analysis)

If you and your team do not leave the SWOT session with a clear idea of what needs to be done, by who, and by when, then the SWOT analysis is incomplete and a lot of time has been wasted. Likewise if you haven’t acknowledged some collective anxieties and faced some groundless organisational vanities, you haven’t completed the SWOT.

It’s much, much more than a list. Have fun!