The PESTLE Exercise

You’ve just completed your Big Goals and Step Goals in the strategic planning process, and you’re probably feeling ready to dive right into execution. However, it’s important to make sure you’re not just charging ahead blindly, otherwise you might find yourself facing risks to your plan you could’ve avoided.

This is where we identify threats to the execution of the Strategic Plan. To get started we use the PESTLE exercise to help us get a 360-degree view of the potential risks we could be facing.

What does PESTLE stand for?

Political (P): What’s going on in the political landscape?

Economic (E): How are changes in interest or exchange rates impacting you?

Social (S): Social pressures, values, and demographics are changing, what does that mean for your organization?

Technological (T): Tech is always changing, from AI to cybersecurity. How do the changes affect your organization?

Legal (L): Regulations, laws, and best practices – do you have eyes on if there are any changes on the horizon?

Environmental (E): How does climate change affect your organization?

How it works:
Step 1: Complete the PESTLE analysis in as many categories as are applicable in your context.

TIP: Try not to overdo it. Constrain the exercise by assigning one or two categories to individuals in a team meeting. Each person works heads down for 10 minutes finding one or two stand-out items. When complete, take 10 minutes total for each person to share, filling them in under a PESTLE diagram.

Step 2: Take a look at the list of threats discovered and identify the top three most applicable and potentially impacting threats identified.

TIP: Try not to think past your big goals. While some of the influences from the PESTLE analysis will be specific to goal areas, the point here is not to get into complex scenarios. For example, if a change in legislation is identified in the PESTLE analysis, and your organization has a goal to influence the regulatory landscape, this is a threat worth discussing because it exists at the big goal level.

The PESTLE analysis puts you in a better position to predict and handle potential external challenges. We’ll continue to refine the top three potential threats you’ve identified in our next email using the “Identifying Risks to Execution” exercise, where you’ll identify the likelihood, impact, and course of action.