SOAR Analysis: Strengths, Opportunities, Aspirations & Results

SOAR analysis is a strategic planning framework that builds a strategic plan around an organization's strengths, opportunities, aspirations, and results.

The name is also the method's central claim: where a traditional strategic planning framework spends real time cataloguing what's wrong, SOAR analysis is built to skip that step entirely. SOAR is used to create actionable, measurable outcomes aligned with a shared vision, built from what an organization already does well and what it wants to become, rather than from a list of internal weaknesses and external threats.

What SOAR Analysis Is: Four Letters, Two Time Frames

SOAR stands for Strengths, Opportunities, Aspirations, and Results. Strengths and Opportunities look at the present: the internal strengths and key assets an organization can already draw on, and the external factors and new opportunities available in its current market. Aspirations and Results look forward: the shared vision the organization wants to reach, and the specific, measurable outcomes and tangible outcomes that would prove it got there. SOAR analysis uses a 2x2 grid to visualize strategy precisely because of this split; the top row of the matrix addresses the present, and the bottom row addresses the desired future, letting a team see both time frames on one page during a strategic planning session.

SOAR emphasizes building upon current capabilities rather than focusing on weaknesses, and SOAR focuses on future possibilities rather than recent past and current situations once the top row of the matrix is established. That forward lean is deliberate: SOAR encourages innovative thinking and vision for the future by asking a team what's possible before it asks what's broken, on the theory that a group primed to think about strengths and opportunities generates different, more ambitious strategic plans than a group that starts by listing everything currently going wrong.

Where SOAR Analysis Comes From

Jacqueline Stavros and Gina Hinrichs created the SOAR analysis framework and formalized it in The Thin Book of SOAR: Building Strengths-Based Strategy, published July 23, 2009 by Thin Book Publishing, with a foreword from Sue Annis Hammond. Stavros, a professor at Lawrence Technological University with decades of experience in strategy and organization development, built the thin book specifically to give strategic planning teams a shorter, more practical alternative to lengthier academic strategy texts.

SOAR analysis takes its underlying philosophy directly from Appreciative Inquiry, an approach to organizational change David Cooperrider and Suresh Srivastva developed at Case Western Reserve University, beginning with a 1987 article that argued organizational research spent too much time diagnosing problems and not enough time studying what already worked. Appreciative inquiry became a broader movement across organization development, and SOAR is one of the more direct applications of that philosophy to strategic planning specifically, carrying the same instruction: study strengths first, and let that study generate the plan.

SOAR Analysis vs. SWOT Analysis

SOAR analysis omits weaknesses and threats unlike SWOT, which is the single clearest difference between the two frameworks. SWOT analysis includes weaknesses and threats in its assessment specifically because it's built to produce a complete, balanced picture of an organization's position, strengths and weaknesses internally, opportunities and threats externally. SOAR analysis focuses on strengths and opportunities only, on the theory that time spent cataloguing weaknesses and threats is time not spent building toward the aspirations and results an organization is trying to reach.

SOAR is more action-oriented than SWOT analysis, and SOAR is ideal for organizations focused on growth and innovation rather than organizations facing a specific competitive threat or internal failure that needs to be named and addressed directly. Neither framework is a strict upgrade over the other; SOAR analysis is best for organizations seeking growth and innovation, while a SWOT analysis remains the better choice whenever weaknesses or threats are serious enough that ignoring them in the strategic plan would be its own kind of risk.

Conducting a SOAR Analysis: Five Steps

SOAR analysis involves five steps for effective implementation. The first step is analyzing current state and desired future, gathering internal and external stakeholders, key stakeholders from every organizational level, to identify current strengths and the external factors shaping new markets and new opportunities. The second step convenes relevant stakeholders in a structured conversation, often using sticky notes and a physical or digital SOAR analysis template, to surface ideas about what the organization does well and where it wants to go.

The third step builds a shared vision and shared understanding of the organization's aspirations from those conversations, translating individual ideas into a single strategic plan the team can agree on. The fourth step is to define measurable results and smart goals: specific, trackable targets tied to the aspirations agreed on in step three, since a SOAR analysis that stops at "we want to grow" without measurable outcomes attached gives a team nothing concrete to track progress against. The fifth step is monitoring progress on a regular schedule, since SOAR analysis should be updated annually to remain relevant as market share, trends, and an organization's own capabilities shift.

A diverse team enhances the effectiveness of SOAR analysis at every one of these five steps, since a planning team drawn only from senior leadership tends to generate a narrower set of ideas about strengths and opportunities than a team that includes voices from across the organization and, where relevant, external stakeholders like customers or partners. An in depth analysis run by a single department, without that broader input, produces a strategic plan the rest of the organization is less likely to feel buy-in toward once it's time to implement it.

Pros and Cons of SOAR Analysis

SOAR analysis builds a growth-oriented mindset in organizations and helps create a shared vision that a strengths-only conversation makes easier to reach consensus around than a conversation that starts by assigning blame for weaknesses. Because SOAR analysis focuses on strengths and opportunities only, planning sessions tend to generate more new ideas and more positive engagement from participants than a SWOT session that opens by asking a room to list what's wrong with the organization.

The trade-off is real: SOAR analysis is not ideal for assessing threats, and an organization that uses SOAR analysis while facing a genuine external threat, a new competitor, a regulatory change, a technology shift, risks a strategic plan that undersells the danger because the framework never asked the team to name it. SOAR analysis requires ongoing reviews to prevent strategic drift for the same reason: without an explicit threats-and-weaknesses check built into the process, an organization can drift away from a changing market while its SOAR analysis keeps reporting steady progress against goals set under older assumptions.

Organization development consultants and the occasional AI practitioner brought in to help a leadership team plan often introduce SOAR analysis as a planning tool, and a powerful tool at that, precisely because it builds buy in fast: strategic thinking rooted in appreciation tends to win support from participants who'd resist a SWOT session opening with a list of their department's weaknesses. A well-run SOAR matrix supports informed decisions by pairing an organization's unique skills and available resources against real new opportunities, partnerships, and new markets, the kind of positive transformation consultants who care deeply about long term success are usually trying to engineer. Filled out in good faith rather than as a public-relations exercise, the soar model gives a leadership team something a generic strategy deck rarely does: a specific, dated commitment to check its own aspirations against results a year later.

A Note on the Other SOAR

Readers searching "SOAR" sometimes land here from a different field entirely: in cybersecurity, SOAR refers to Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response, a category of software that automates a security team's incident-response workflow, often built around a SIEM system that feeds it alerts. The two SOARs share nothing but an acronym; a cybersecurity SOAR platform automates threat detection, while the SOAR analysis covered here is a strategic planning framework a leadership team runs by hand, in a room, with sticky notes and a shared vision rather than a security operations center.

Applying SOAR Analysis to a Real Case File

SOAR analysis is a planning tool, not a verification method, and its strengths-based design is exactly why it can't replace an outside check on whether an organization's aspirations match its actual record. The case files on this site apply a different kind of analysis, checking a company's own public claims against court filings, earnings calls, and regulatory records, the same discipline a SOAR analysis session doesn't include by design. A strategic plan built entirely on strengths and aspirations is worth reading against the record before assuming its results claims held up.