Gathering knowledge to assess your situation

Use this page to select the right tools to help you understand your landscape and conditions.

How you make change will be affected by:

• how the world is changing and how you respond
• what other organisations do and your relationships with them
• what your organisation is good at and chooses to focus on.

These influences will be important for making good decisions.

In this section, we share a number of tools to help you understand your landscape and conditions in these three ways.

Thinking about how the world around you is changing (often called ‘environmental or external analysis’) will help you to understand:

• things you are already working on that need to be changed or improved
• opportunities that need to be considered for future action
• threats that you’ll need to manage.

No organisation can solve complex challenges alone. Understanding the focus of other organisations involved in your area of work (sometimes called an ‘ecosystem’) will help you to understand:

• what role you want to play in relation to others
• opportunities to collaborate or work in partnership.

Understanding your organisation’s strengths and weaknesses (often called ‘internal analysis’), will help you to:

• build on your strengths
• improve or stop the things that you don’t do so well.

There are a number of tools to help. These can be used by organisations of all sizes.

You can use these tools alone, but involving people with a range of experience and perspectives will give you deeper insight.